Podcasts about Google Finance

So, the economy has been going through it over the last couple months — and especially over the last week in particular. That's a plain fact. But it's more than… The post Here We Go Again: Marketing in Another Bizarre Economy (Thinks Out Loud 456) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

16th Oct: Blockchain DXB Podcast

Building Plans for an Uncertain Future — Big Tech Earnings Q2 2024 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 431) Big Tech announced their earnings for Q2 2024 and, to be honest, not… The post Building Plans for an Uncertain Future — Big Tech Earnings Q2 2024 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 431) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

London's FTSE 100 opened sharply lower though it was hard to be certain due to a massive outage across Microsoft platforms that seemingly has knocked out the London Stock Exchange's site. According to Google Finance, the Footsie was down 52 at 8,152 in early trades. The problem caused chaos across the globe, with banks and IT systems crippled and planes grounded. Microsoft announced on its social media accounts that it was "investigating an issue impacting users' ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services". Ryanair warned of a “third party IT issue” affecting “all airlines operating across the network”, while Gatwick Airport has warned of cancellations. Hargreaves Lansdown did get its numbers out, with the wealth platform noting stronger share-dealing volumes and record assets under management of £155.3 billion. Hargreaves is facing a £5.3 billion takeover from private equity group CVC. UK Retail sales for June meanwhile declined 1.2% month over month, a threefold undershoot against the 0.4% slip expected by analysts. It follows a 2.9% rise in May. #proactiveinvestors #marketreport #ftse #ftse100 #footsie #microsoft #microsoftoutage #outage #ryanair #gatwick #hargreaveslansdown #retailsales #invest #investing #investment #investor #stockmarket #stocks #stock #stockmarketnews

Join me as I do a Google Finance stock study after the close of the stock market on Friday, August 25, 2013. Join me on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/danelledautri... Music: "Lazy Walk" Artist: Cheel --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/danelledautrievesanford/support

Want some advice? You'll find it in this episode where we interview Financial Advisor Jon Cunningham on best practices to teach kids financial skills and tips to start investing early. Don't miss out! This episode is especially great for parents and kids to listen together. This is a two part series so stay tuned! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Transcript Advisor Advice Part 2 Welcome back to another episode of the Cash Kid Podcast. If you haven’t already, be sure to visit our website at cashkidpodcast.com for more resources and links to past episodes. Follow us on Instagram as well. Today, is part 2 of our “Advisor Advice” interview with financial advisor Mr. Jon Cunningham. If you missed the first part of my interview with him, definitely go back and listen to it first. So much great advice… and he’s got more to share. The Cash Kid Podcast is underway. (music) Intro tease: So you’ve got some cash. Maybe from an allowance, or that money your grandma gave you for your 7th birthday (Here you go sweetie.) Thanks grandma. Whatever it is, what are you going to do with it? Spend it, hide it away… or maybe invest it? Let’s start learning how to make that money grow. Time to learn how to be a cash kid. (cash register) Alright, let’s jump right back into part 2 of our interview with Mr. Jon Cunningham. (music) Cash Kid - So what are some ways that kids can learn about personal finance in the stock market? Jon - Yeah, another great question. You know, I think it's very important someone once told me to always preserve precious capital. And so as you're working as a young person and you're working hard and you're sweating outside maybe mowing grass or doing chores for your parents, the last thing you want to do is earn that money and then lose it. So it's important that you really understand how investments and how the stock market works before you just put money in an account and buy a stock and hope for the best, right? Cash Kid - Definitely. Jon - You know, even when I was in high school, we had a stock market simulation game. And so there are programs out there that will basically give you plain money. So it's not real money. You're not subjecting your own money to risk, but you're buying stocks with this, you know, fake money and not real stocks. But it's a way to simulate how stocks work in the buying and the selling of stocks and researching them without putting money at risk. So that's an easy and safe way for a young person to really understand and learn the market without actually subjecting their money to risk of loss. Cash Kid- Yeah. In our previous episode we've talked about what is the stock market game. And so we talked with one of my teachers that introduced that to me. Jon - Oh cool. Cash Kid - That's how I learned about the stock market. And so that's what our previous episode was about. What are some ways kids can start earning, saving and investing their money? Jon - Yeah, this is going to require a little bit of involvement from from Mom and Dad. But until you reach the age of adulthood, you really can't open an investment account without the involvement of a parent or guardian. So their accounts called up UTMAs Uniformed Transfer of Minors Accounts, and these are accounts that are owned by a guardian or a parent for your benefit. And money can go into these investment accounts and certainly can be invested for your benefit. However, the parent owns this account, so the funds have to be used for you and for your benefit and someday would have to be transferred to you when you became an adult. So this would be a safe way. I'd say safe. This could be a way to open an account with parental oversight that you can invest some of your money in the market that eventually could be for your benefit. Cash Kid - Yeah. Do you think there are any, like, jobs out there that kids could do? Jon - Oh, absolutely. I mean, I have three kids. I love it when they work for me. And I think I think oftentimes kids try to find creative ways of forming a business early, whether it be mowing grass or everything from that to pressure washing, things like that. And oftentimes it's tough to find prospects. It's tough to find customers. It takes time and energy and money and overhead to to make that income. When oftentimes you can find things in your own backyard that you can do for your parents that they would really appreciate and also be willing to pay you some money to do it. And so certainly, I think it's a good thing for kids to have chores and allowances, but then also to work for for that money. So that could be something you talk to your parents about and say, hey, I want to make, you know, $25 a month, you know, what can I do around the house to make that kind of money? And I'm sure, you know, most parents would be happy to oblige. Cash Kid - Yes. Now, I assume you would agree that parents can play a big role in the financial success of kids. I mean, kids are always thinking of a way to pick up spending habits. What ways can parents be involved in helping set their kids on a healthy financial path? Jon - Yeah Cash Kid another great question. One of the biggest issues with with our economy right now is just that more with the amount of student loan debt that's out there. To understand what a student loan is, when a young person wants to go to college and they don't have the the cash or the resources to pay for tuition, room and board and all those types of things, they'll go to lending and lending institutions to get a loan to cover those costs. And often time, oftentimes interest and payments are deferred on those loans until that person graduates. So the risk associated with that is the student goes to college, incurs this debt and they graduate and number one maybe they can't find a job or they can't find a job that pays enough money for them to cover the student loan debt, plus all their other living expenses that's out there. So part of the way that parents can help their their kids be on a on a good financial trajectory is to make sure that they're making little decisions early on in their children's lives by setting money aside in a college related accounts like 529 plans or or other investment accounts that are earmarked for for their kids college. So with some of the listeners that you might be having here, a question could be you know, what can I be doing to set money aside that could help my parents pay for my college someday? Or maybe it's, you know, what can I be doing to do really well in school that I get what's called a scholarship and some of my tuition might be covered and all that could be helpful and ways of setting yourselves up financially for the future. But then also to I think it's important for parents just to be good examples and show good stewardship and be good stewards of the cash flow and educate kids on just simply what's a credit card mean or what's a checking account, and then what can we be doing to ensure I'm building a good credit score, even at a young age. Just kind of having transparent conversations like that I think are really important. Cash Kid - Yes. So, um, I'm sure you tell this to your partners in a lot of like work that you do. So when you educate others about early investing, why do you think early investing is important? Jon - Well, that's a great question. So I was prepared to answer that one. So yeah, when you look at the cost of waiting and waiting on investing, it's very expensive. So take an example of a ten year old child that says, hey, I have $600 a year or $50 a month that I want to invest and I'm going to invest that money and hopefully earn 6% growth for the next 55 years. So you're looking at starting at ten years old to age 65 to 55 years. Guess how much money that person has in 55 years? They have $236,503. So they started at age ten and saved the exact same amount between age ten and age 65. So now let's fast forward and say, hey, a 15 year old says, Hey, I want to do the exact same thing. I want to set aside $50 a month or $600 per year for the next 50 years until I'm 65 years old. Guess how much money that person has? They have $174,201.54, assuming they can make 6% every single year. The cost difference of a little over $62,000. So you see there's a significant cost to waiting and delaying, saving and investing at a young age. Now, there's not many ten year olds that can set aside 600 bucks a year. You know, consistently. That's a lot of work and that's a lot of chores. And and that's understandable. But just that exercise shows you that it's very important to start early, especially when you get out of college and you start making an income to really begin diligently saving and setting money aside for the future and not delaying because it is expensive. Cash Kid - Right? So what age would you say somebody could start investing? Jon - Well, really, it could it could start at any time with the assistance of Mom and Dad or guardian. But typically you have to be at age 18 to open an account by yourself and have an account individually owned by by just yourself. So you have to be 18 years old to have your own account. But again, going back to the previous point, you can open what's called UTMA with the assistance of Mom and Dad. Cash Kid - Right. So what resources would you suggest about researching companies to invest or find an advisor like yourself to get help? Jon - Yeah, that's a great question. You know, oftentimes if you just simply ask your Mom and Dad say, hey, you know, do we have a financial advisor? And chances are they're going to say yes. And oftentimes they'd be happy to talk to people like you Cash Kid and your little listeners for sure, especially if they have good questions. So I think that's step one just to kind of say, hey, is there an existing relationship that I can take advantage of and ask them questions, number one. Number two, if that's not available, you know, Google Finance is something that's a great tool. You can go on and check any stock and you can see all the publicly offered information like revenue and expenses and have it done all of these types of things for the marketplace. So Google finance is a very good and free resource to research and look into the stocks that you have interest in. Cash Kid - That's it for today. We appreciate your time and your expertise. Thank you for joining us on the call today and boosting the financial knowledge of the fellow cash kids everywhere. Remember that anybody can be a cash kid. You just have to learn how to become one. Jon - Thanks, Cash Kid (music) Thank you Mr. Jon. Wow, I’ve got some more homework to do for sure as I learned a lot from Mr. Jon and excited to think of the payout to investing early and knowing how to be financial smart early in life. More great interviews like this one in future episodes. Remember to visit us at the cashkidpodcast.com for more helpful tools, information, and past episodes. Cash Kid, out! Disclaimer: The information presented represents the views and opinions of the guests. This show does not intend to provide personal investment advice through this podcast. This content has been made for informational and educational purposes only. To make a full and informed investment decision, we advise you to speak with a financial advisor and for kids, definitely your parents first before investing.

Hi, I talk about investing on a small budget. Today I review may current portfolio and use the Google Finance stock watch feature. Enjoy the journey, Danelle --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/danelledautrievesanford/support

Few record labels have left their stamp on the industry quite like Motown. This assembly line churned out hit song after hit song in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. With a who's-who roster — Marin Gaye, The Jackson 5, Diana Ross, and Stevie Wonder, among others — The Hitsville U.S.A. sign Gordy put on Motown's front door became warranted. This episode is the story of Motown Records — it's formula for success, what led to its decline, and where it stands today under Universal. I'm joined by friend of the pod, Zack O'Malley Greenburg. Here's what we covered in this episode:0:38 Berry Gordy's origin story8:08 Motown museum in Detroit9:20 Cultivating a culture of creativity13:05 Shifting the sound of Black music20:12 Motown's knack for discovering talent 34:29 The beginning of the decline36:12 80's decade of transition39:48 Post-Gordy struggles45:51 Motown's uncertainty today53:59 Best signing?55:16 Best business move?568:45 Dark horse move?1:01:58 Biggest missed opportunity?1:07:13 Motown big-screen picture1:09:22 Berry Gordy won big1:10:41 Who lost the most?1:14:56 Zack's Jay Z indexListen: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | SoundCloud | Stitcher | Overcast | Amazon | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts | RSSHost: Dan Runcie, @RuncieDan, trapital.coGuests: Zack O'Malley Greenburg, @zogblogThis episode is sponsored by DICE. Learn more about why artists, venues, and promoters love to partner with DICE for their ticketing needs. Visit dice.fmEnjoy this podcast? Rate and review the podcast here! ratethispodcast.com/trapitalTrapital is home for the business of music, media and culture. Learn more by reading Trapital's free memo.TRANSCRIPT[00:00:00] Zack Greenburg: Berry Gordy created with Motown and sort of the Motown genre, which I think really like more than any label has become synonymous beyond just sort of like the name of label itself, you say Motown music, and a testament to the sound that he created,[00:00:13] Dan Runcie Audio Intro: Hey, welcome to the Trapital Podcast. I'm your host and the founder of Trapital, Dan Runcie. This podcast is your place to gain insights from the executives in music, media, entertainment, and more who are taking hip hop culture to the next level.[00:00:38] Dan Runcie Guest Intro: Today's episode is a deep dive into the one and only legendary Motown records. At its peak, Motown was the most successful black business in the country. It peaked at 30 million dollars of revenue in 1968 and Barry Gordy and his team assembled a sound. a unique genre of music that produced hit after hit after hit and Hitsville USA lived up to its promise.So in this episode, we take you through the origins of how Motown came to be. What are some of the business principles and strategies that worked in its favor? And then what are some of the challenges that Motown faced too? It's now been 50 years since the peak of Motown. And this record label has had plenty of ups and downs and plenty of journeys that we went deep on in this episode. And I'm joined by Zach Greenburg He is a biographer of Jay Z and several others, and he also wrote about Michael Jackson. And in that he talked about Michael Jackson's time with Motown, especially in the Jackson 5. So we had a lot of fun in this one. So come take a trip down memory lane with us. Here's our episode on Motown.[00:01:42] Dan Runcie: All right. Today we're back with another case study style episode, and we're going deep into Hitsville, USA. Motown, baby. Let's do this, Zack, I'm excited for this one.[00:01:53] Zack Greenburg: Thanks for having me as always.[00:01:55] Dan Runcie: Berry Gordy is so fascinating because At one point, this was the most successful black business. They're the most successful black entrepreneur in the country invented a genre.And it's so hard to be able to do that. And that legacy still lives on today. We know so many record labels that have taken inspiration from what Berry Gordy built with Motown records, but let's start from the beginning. What inspired Berry Gordy to even want to get involved with music in the first place?[00:02:23] Zack Greenburg: Yeah. So, you know, Berry Gordy, and his family were in the Detroit area, you know, a bunch of serial entrepreneurs, get a record shop early on, but he was actually like semi professional boxer coming up. And, think one thing led to another and you just kind of saw that, you know, there was a market that was not being served in music.you know, certainly like the business was concentrated, on the coast and particularly in New York at that time, you know, eventually more in LA, but. you know, there was some stuff going on in Chicago. there was some regional acts, regional labels, things like that. But, you know, I think he just basically saw an opportunity, to start something.And, you know, sort of in the way that if you look at, Richard Branson or Puffy or, you know, what are those types of entrepreneurs? It's almost It doesn't really matter what they get into. They find a way to make it work. and they're just always on the lookout for a new sector. That's, kind of, you know, right for some creative destruction, know, and some refreshing or some freshening, some revising, I don't know, whatever you would call it.And, you know, in the case of Berry Gordy. Kind of amazingly, when you think about music over the past half century, he looked around and he thought, well, this is actually, this is a sector that is very promising amongst all the sectors that I could possibly get into. So, that's how Motown came to pass.[00:03:36] Dan Runcie: That point about whether it's Diddy, Branson, Gordy, and I think a lot of the tech CEOs fall in this category as well. You're going to put them in any generation. And I do think that these people would have found a way to make things work. And that's the same point you're making, right? He saw an opportunity to music, but let's say he came 30 years later.It could have been another aspect. Let's say he came today, probably could have been trying to do something in AI or even figure it out, how to make AI, be transformative with his music. And I think a lot of his work, whether you think about how he built derivative work or how he had this process with artists that we'll get into so much of it taps into, okay, here's an opportunity to optimize things.Here's how we can make things work. And music just happened to be the format. He chose it.[00:04:21] Zack Greenburg: Absolutely. And even, you know, when you think about it, he got started sort of mid century 30 years later, he was looking into other things, getting involved in film and TV. And You know, moving the business out West, but, you know, we'll get there eventually, but, he certainly did, you know, find other ways to extend the Motown brand as time went on.[00:04:37] Dan Runcie: So he starts off, he has this record business and things go okay with that. specifically talking about the store. And that was a lot of it was connected a bit more from the family perspective, but then he ends up getting the job at Ford specifically working with that Lincoln mercury plant. And that's when he was only there for 2 years, but he then sees how the process works and the whole concept of Ford is, which is that assembly line process that Henry Ford has been famous for.He sees that and then he taps back into his opportunities with music and he's like, okay. Okay, there's an opportunity to do the same with music. So he sees this assembly line, essentially have all these parts go through the inputs. And then the output, you get this car, he wanted to be able to pull some kid off the street, bring them into the Motown and bring them into this record label facility.And then outcomes a star. And he felt like he had the ability to be able to create that type of dynamic. And it took some time to get there, but that's essentially what he did. And a lot of the creations of what we saw from Hitsville USA was that exactly.[00:05:48] Zack Greenburg: Absolutely. And, he'll tell you that, I've interviewed him a couple of times. Once for Forbes, once for my book, Michael Jackson Inc, where he talked a lot about that. And, you know, he really has a formula, for making a hit song. And, you know, it's sort of like the song has to have a clear beginning, middle at an end. The chorus has to have a sort of grand arc that summarizes the song every time it happens.And then there's a sort of like grand finale bridge ending thing that, brings it all together, always at the end you hear the artist shout out the song's name almost, you know, invariably one last time and you know, that's like pure marketing, right? And you think about it in those days, this great songs on, you're hearing it, but like, you know, maybe you're in the car, it's on the radio, maybe you're artist and a record player.It's not popping up on your phone. So you know what it's called when you hear Michael Jackson shout out, I want you back at the end and I want you back. what you're going to go out and buy, you know what, you're going to call in, you know, to the radio station and ask them to play. So, it's very calculated, it really works and it's proven and, you know, if it sort of seems like, gosh. You know, this is like a cliche. This is obvious. I think part of it is because he helped create this cliche, obvious thing, right? I mean, things become cliche or obvious because they're smart or necessary most of the time.So, you know, at some point it was novel and, you know, very corny, I think was part of, making that whole song structure novel. And, you know, really. When you look at how he executed it, you know, I think a modern day analog, we talked about this, you know, before on our bad boy episode, but so, you know, his role was very much like the Puffy role, or at least the early Puffy role in production. So, you know, he had a hand in songwriting and production, but, you know, mostly he figured out who he wanted to have producing his labels, songs and sort of who he wanted to be in charge of authoring that certain type of sound.So for Berry Gordy, it was a handful of, producers called the corporation, just like Puffy had the Hitmen. And, you know, then he would kind of come in and do his own little thing on top when he thought it was necessary. But, you know, in a way it kind of adds that whole assembly line aspect, right? Where, you know, that there's going to be a certain level of quality, there's going to be like a distinctive sound, whether it's a bad boy or Motown, or, you know, even going back to, you know, what a Ford car was, you know, in those days you had kind of an ideology to get.And I think that's one of the things that really set Motown apart.[00:08:08] Dan Runcie: Exactly. And I think with that too, you have him going through the process of starting this. So this record label started with an 800 with 800. That's what he had initially. And he uses that to then start Hitsville USA. So that's the location on Grand Ave in Detroit.Have you been to this museum by the way?[00:08:30] Zack Greenburg: I did. We did a special event there. One time we had the Forbes 30 under 30, Summit and we did this like, special, like one off private interview where I went there with Quavo and we sat in Motown studios, you know, where Michael Jackson and all them had recorded. and we did a little like video discussion on the state of the music business, I think it's floating around the internet somewhere, but, it's a really cool building. I mean, I think what strikes. Me the most, you know, like the first time I went in is like the fact that just a house.I mean, it really just looks like a house. the rooms are sort of like room size, you know, it's not some sprawling like, you know, I don't know, institutional type place like a lot of modern, recording studios, you know, it's just a converted house but you know, you kind of walk through each room and it's museum and everything now, so you can kind of get a feel for it. It's very different from the modern day glitz and glamour of the record business for sure.[00:09:20] Dan Runcie: Yeah, been there twice. it was really cool because just like you said, you feel like you're actually in a home and that's the vibe that the studio gives you. And I felt like the people that were the tour guides as well, they clearly knew their history in a way where it should sound obvious, but that could obviously be hit or miss with museum sometimes.So I felt like that piece of it was good. And it ties back to a few things that tap into the culture that it is. Gordy wanted to create that. I think make it work. He lived upstairs. Studio is downstairs. So he has everything there and he wanted to make this somewhere that creativity could spawn at any particular moment.So he wanted to create a 24/7. Set up where he had made sure the vending machines were always stocked. So people could stay there year, you know, day in day out. If creativity comes to you at 3 p. m. or 3 a. m. you can go right there and do what you have to do. And you could keep things moving there internally.And this is one of the things that I do think worked really well for them because. Although I think the music industry has gotten away from this, there was this era where the culture and the vibe that you could create from a label and all that continuity really helped things. So when you saw how deliberate he was from an assembly line perspective was essentially keeping his product in place and keeping all the materials in place so that it can produce outputs at any given moments to just increase the likelihood that you could have hits coming time and time again.[00:10:49] Zack Greenburg: Yeah, for sure. And, you know, I mean, he certainly spoke a lot about, quality control, which is, it's kind of funny, you know, given the eventual QC relationship, but, you know, I think that's a really big part of it. And when you're that hands on and, you know, in some cases you could say micromanaging, but it does enable you to really have a unified.We can also get into this, fact that at some point it can become a bit of a creative constraint for artists as they mature.[00:11:14] Dan Runcie: Right, because with quality control, there was someone on the team that listened to everything that came through Motown and they essentially picked the best. They brought it to this weekly meeting and most of the Motown artists weren't writing or producing their materials necessarily, but they were going in and you had all these artists that would essentially sing.The same exact song and then they would pick the best version that came out of that to then release the song. Sometimes they had multiple artists that would end up releasing a version. And we saw different versions of this where you had both Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye have their versions of Ain't No Mountain high enough.Granted it was a few years later in different songs, but a lot of that stems from that quality control aspect. And there's this one quote that, was here from One of the books that was written about, Berry Gordy and Motown, where they talked about quality control and they said, quote, the artists were a means to an end in a way, end quote.And that's exactly what we're talking about how the downside is that it could limit creativity, but the upside is that it gives you the opportunity to get the best polished diamond from all of the creations that come from this studio.[00:12:24] Zack Greenburg: Absolutely. And man, there were quite a few, right? I mean, when you look through, I mean, the heydays, Smokey Robinson, the Miracles, Diana Ross, the Supremes, Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, coming into, you know, Michael Jackson, the Jackson 5, you know, think we've talked about in our previous discussions about hip hop, you know, like sort of the staying power, of different labels and, you know, and how you can kind of keep identifying talent and keep it coming. I mean, that's quite a breadth You know, of like musical accomplishment that they've got, that you could say that Berry Gordy identified over the years.So, you know, I would really, obviously I'd put him up against any other, identify any A& R, any, you know, music mogul in the history of the business, for sure.[00:13:05] Dan Runcie: I agree. And I think the other thing that's interesting too, is This taps back into the whole process and quality management things. Berry Gordy really wanted to help shift the sound and direction of this label because at the time, black music and music that was made by black artists was quite segmented where people didn't feel like it could reach beyond a certain audience.And he experienced some of this himself. One of the reasons that his record stores closed was because he was focused primarily on jazz music. At the time, even Black folks weren't really into jazz at that particular moment. So he just didn't have the market to be able to continue this. So I think that helps Chase Motower.He says, okay, I want the music that's able to be listened to by everyone. I want Black people to ride with it. I want white people. I want anyone in America to be able to ride with the same way that people would listen to the Beach Boys. And he had a few more interesting things that were part of this process.One, everyone had an etiquette coach. And these are things that we're teaching them, essentially, how you have black people essentially speak to white people. Granted, I think there's a lot of that that is problematic. That probably wouldn't fly into the same ways today, just given some of the language there.but then additionally, he also had white salesmen that were essentially the ones that were promoting the records in different areas, going to different radio stations. And he would go as far to insert in records that he's promoting to not even show the artist on the cover because he wanted the record to reach.And he didn't want people to necessarily immediately see or relate it to a black artist, which I thought was interesting, but lined up with a lot of these things. So, even though some of the choices clearly were problematic, it probably wouldn't fly at the same way today. That's how he was about process and wanting to essentially be able to sell this talent anywhere in the country.[00:15:01] Zack Greenburg: Yeah, and it's especially remarkable when you sort think of the cultural context of, you know, of when this is all happening in the 60s. You know, I mean, this is a time of great polarization and social change and, you know, really like turmoil, in a lot of ways, disunity, but, what Berry Gordy created with Motown and sort of the Motown genre, which I think really like more than any label has become synonymous like a genre, you know, beyond just sort of like the name of label itself, you say Motown music, and you're talking about like a genre, as much as you're talking about a label, the fact that you'd be able to sort of create that it like in the 60s, even the late 60s, when things were really why we think we're polarized now.I mean, the late sixties, oh my gosh. Like what a testament to the sort of the sound that he created, which, you know, just like bridged all these divides and, you know, you obviously still go to any wedding, black, white, you know, at anything. And, you're gonna hear Motown all over the place.So I think that kind of goes back to what he created, you know, even at the time. being so accessible to so many different audiences and, you know, one of the things he told me, when I interviewed him, he said that, Martin Luther King came to see him, in Detroit, at the peak of the civil rights movement.And apparently, according to Gary Gordy, MLK said, he said, what I'm trying to do politically and intellectually, you're doing with your music. I love the feeling people get when they hear your music. And so maybe we can make a deal. And they made a deal to actually put out some of MLK's greatest speeches.They put out three albums on Motown and Gordy kind of summed it up by saying, if you do the right thing will come to you. So I thought that was such a cool. Little nugget that people don't necessarily realize. and, you know, I think people don't, think of Berry Gordy as like avant garde, you know, civil rights activist or anything, but, he kind of approached it in his own way, which was to make this music that could, you know, that could really bring people together.They could also get black culture, you know, into the mainstream us culture, at the same time. And, you know, I mean, we saw that, you know, decades later with hip hop, but. Berry Gordy, you know, he made that blueprint, you know, very, very, very early on.[00:17:03] Dan Runcie: It's a great story because I think it highlights the complexity and that people just aren't in these corners. And as you mentioned, Berry Gordy wasn't known for his civil rights activism. In many ways, people would often point to things that he may have shied away from, where I remember, especially in the 70s when you started to hear a bit more of a pacifist and things like that, there was a push and people wanted Motown to lead more into this and he necessarily wasn't as eager at the time and I remember even Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, one of the biggest records that was ever made.There was tension leading up to that because Gordy was like, wait, what is this? you want to do this? Like, what are we doing here? And then it eventually gets made. And then you see how I feel like every time that one of these publications has one of the greatest songs ever made, I'm sure it's come up on number one, or at least on several, one of these.So you see that, and you've seen other areas where he clearly has leaned into this, but I do think that his. Place in his role at that time, often highlighted some of that ongoing tension that we've seen from black leaders over the years about people want progress, but what's the best way to agree with this?And you date back to some of the more public debates between folks like Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Dubois about what is the best way for black progress and group economics and things like that. And I feel like Berry Gordy clearly was on a Particular side of that, that not everyone may have agreed with, but he clearly still wanted to be able to help progress things in a particular way.So he's a very fascinating figure as we look at this progression, especially in the 20th century.[00:18:42] Zack Greenburg: Well, that's right. And, you know, I think there's a reason you see him put out MLK speeches. I don't, think he put up Malcolm X's speeches, you know, but that was just sort of his approach, right? He was more Martin than Malcolm.And, you know, obviously you could speak to the merits of either method, but, Berry Gordon definitely, had his preference there.[00:18:59] Dan Runcie: The other thing that I want to talk about, you mentioned it earlier, but the talent and the breadth of talent that was in this place is such a constraint and such a valuable time.It's one of those things where just imagine walking through on a, some day in, let's say 1964, you're just walking through Motown and all of the names that you could just see there making music on a Wednesday afternoon. It's crazy to think of the names and also how he found folks because. Look at Smokey Robinson and Smokey Robinson, the miracles essentially end up releasing shop around, which I do think ends up becoming the first true hit that, or the first, hit single that comes from Motown.He found that he found Smokey on a street corner performing almost, and in many ways, it feels similar to. What we see decades later with Sylvia Robinson driving around the New Jersey tri state area, finding hip hop artists for Sugar Hill Gang. This is how these early entrepreneurs did it. They were the talent development.They saw things and granted it was a much less crowded market. So the people that were pushing music onto folks had a little bit easier time breaking through, but it was still tough, especially at the time. And he was able to make it work in that way, which was, cool.[00:20:13] Zack Greenburg: Yeah, I mean, he actually did. And, you know, of course, like the one group that we haven't talked about too much yet is Jackson and sort of the way that, different groups were signed in those days, you know, they're all the stories about, well, you hear, you see somebody busking and you sign them and this and that.And, sort of some of the stories, though, if you talk to a lot of different people, you get, you talk to 3 people, you get 3 different stories. Right? So, I think for my book on MJ, I talked to. His dad, I talked to Berry Gordy and I talked to the guy who signed them to this little record company called Steel Town in Gary, Indiana.And they all had three different versions of, you know, how it went down, right? And so, there's that old saying, basically that the winners get to write history and, you know, Berry Gordy won. So, you know, whether his version is a hundred percent, accurate or not, that's kind of the version that, you know, we tend to hear I think his version is usually correct, but there's definitely some, you know, embellishment or some showmanship from time to time.So, you know, I think, for example, with the Jackson 5, Berry Gordy decided to put out, I think it was their first album as Diana Ross presents the Jackson 5 and, you know, she had this little thing where she's like, I discovered this group from Gary, Indiana and like blah, blah, blah, and that wasn't really how it happened at all.And it was really, you know, depending on who you ask, but I think what happened is Suzanne DePasse, who was one of Berry Gordy's lieutenants, had discovered them, and I think it was, there's another band who heard them, like sent them along to Suzanne DePasse that like, she kind of did the legwork for Berry Gordy.And it was like many times, many. Kind of connections later that Diana Ross, you know, became connected, to the group. but, you know, it's such a better story, right? Like Diana Ross has found these kids from, from the Midwest and, you know, bringing them out, onto Motown. So. I always think that's, kind of funny how, the stories end up getting presented and, you know, when you hear it from everybody else involved, I mean, and Diana Ross, of course, did become, really instrumental and especially Michael's life, as time went on, moved to LA and I think she, he actually lived with her for a little while while they were, you know, making the move and all this stuff, but, you know, it, didn't exactly start out that way.[00:22:18] Dan Runcie: Right. And the Jackson 5 is interesting because they, in many ways were the last group that came through in the heyday of Motown because the heyday we're really talking about is that 50 to 60s run that we've been talking about with a lot of the groups and the artists that we mentioned, especially young Marvin Gaye, young Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross and the Supremes.And then Jackson 5 comes along. But they come along towards the end of the decade. And just for some context setting, in 1968, Motown is doing 30 million in revenue. And they at one point had a 65% hit rate on the songs that they released in terms of actually being able to chart. So the highs were quite high and they were, killing it.The thing is, though, in the early 70s, this is where things start to shift a little bit, because at this point, Berry has his eyes set much bigger, and he wants to move beyond things in Detroit, because of course he was in the Hitsville, U.S.A. house, solely, after the riots that happened and there was some damage there, they ended up expanding things closer.they ended up expanding further in Detroit to just get a bigger size studio there as well. But then, he eventually wants to go to Hollywood so that he could get more into film. He wants to get into production for plays. He wants to bring these artists on the big screen. And it makes sense. We see why this is a huge medium.You saw how much, popular this talent is. And if you can get people to see them and buy into this, visual image that he's clearly curated, no different than we saw someone like Diddy decades later curating things, he wanted to do that. And I think that in many ways, this was one of those big challenges that any leader can have.Do you stay with the thing that's working really well? Or do you try to expand? And when you do expand, how do you find out? How do you make sure that you have the best talent around you? How do you make sure that you're well equipped? And I think that bowtie really started to strain because as things started to grow for the label, a lot of the artists started to feel like they were getting neglected because of these broader ambitions.And that in many ways, now we're dating 50 plus years ago to like 1972 timeframe. That's when a lot of ways was the beginning of the end, at least in terms of the Motown that a lot of people grew up with and knew.[00:24:41] Zack Greenburg: I think so for sure. And, you know, I think as an entrepreneur, you have to seek the next thing, right? I mean, you don't want to stagnate and you kind of have to take the risk and go for the next big thing and maybe you succeed and maybe you don't, and I think that's at least the way we've been conditioned to think. On the other hand, there could be an argument for like, we don't need to have this growth at all costs mindset as a society, you know, what's wrong with having a really awesome business that's just like constantly, you know, successful has happy employees, you know, that kind of thing. But, I guess that's, you know, this is, you know, Trapital not, you know, Trapsocialism, I dunno, we're talking within a certain realm of, you know, of economic, styles and systems.So that's what's gotta happen. And that's what Berry Gordy decided to do, you know, by moving everything to LA but we talked, a while ago about John McClain, and his role in kind of in, in the past few decades as an executive. He's somebody who rarely talks, but somebody interviewed him at some point.He said that he thought that moving to LA was, kind of the beginning of the end for Motown, because it, kind of changed Motown from being a trendsetter to being a trend follower. And, I think I agree with that. And, you know, that's not to say that there wasn't additional success, especially, you know, beyond the recorded music business that occurred. And that moving to LA kind of, you know, like supercharged some of that, but yeah, you know, I mean, I think when Motown was in the Motor City, in its namesake place, like, You know, it was sort of like, I don't say the only game in town cause there were other labels, but I think it was sort of, the main game in town and, being in a place that, you know, wasn't sort of the epicenter of the music business allowed it to have kind of its own unique style and not sort of be influenced as much by what else was going on.And, you know, don't forget in those days, it wasn't like everything was, you know, it wasn't like we were all tuning into the same social media channels. you know, we weren't even like really tuned into cable TV or anything like that, you know, there wasn't the same kind of like national culture that there is today that, you know, where trends just kind of like fly across in a second. And things did kind of take time to move from one place to the other. throughout the country. So, you know, there was like a certain regionalism to it that I think set Motown apart and, you know, maybe you lose a little bit, you know, once you're out in LA, but, you know, certainly around that time, you really start to see some of the artists who wanted more creative freedom, leaving, you know, some others pushing back, you know, I think even within, a few years of moving to LA, the Jackson 5, we're kind of, having some issues with Motown and in terms of, you know, can we make some of our own types of music? You know, do we really have to stick to quite the assembly line? So, yeah, I do think it was a mixed bag for Berry Gordy to head west.[00:27:20] Dan Runcie: And this is where things really started to struggle because a lot of what worked for Berry Gordy was so perfect for. The Hitsville USA West Grand Ave mentality of building everything there and not to say that he was only an early stage founder that couldn't necessarily progress. But I think a lot of the processes he had were more fit for that era. So naturally, you see the growing success of the Jackson 5 and Michael is no longer 9 years old.He is at this point now a full on teenager, but unfortunately, it just didn't quite. Progress in a few things, as you mentioned, you wanted more, they wanted more creative control. They also wanted to have a bit more ownership. There were disputes about royalties. And I remember reading something that said that the Jackson 5 had calculated how much they got.And it was only a 2.3% stake of how much revenue was either coming through or would be coming through in the future. And they see this and they're like, okay, well how can we see our opportunity to get more of that? So then they leave for Epic. And then you also saw a handful of artists at this point were already on their ways out and things were definitely starting to look a little bit more bleak because by the time you get to the end of the seventies, the beginning of 1980s, The music industry was already, granted things are cyclical, but they were starting to sour a bit on black music.This was the end of disco and people wanted nothing to do with that genre. And even though Motown wasn't disco necessarily, there was vibes of the types of artists they were trying to naturally capture in the 70s. So then that had all of black music taking a hit in a lot of ways and there were groups like the barge and others that I think they tried to make work. Obviously, I think Stevie Wonder was a mainstay during all this and that worked out really well for them, but he was really just 1 mainstay. You did have Marvin Gaye, but again, still, it just wasn't necessarily. The same, and I think that they definitely started to struggle even more at that particular moment.And even as early as the 80s, you start to see more of that narrative that honestly, you still hear today about recapturing that Motown magic or recapturing that Motown journey. People have been saying this now for 40 years.[00:29:40] Zack Greenburg: Yeah, for sure. And I think one thing that people forget is that even though the Jackson 5 moved on to Epic, you know, and that's where MJ ended up, you know, Epic and CBS, and, that's where MJ ended up launching a solo career, people forget that Jermaine actually stayed at Motown initially. He had married Berry Gordy's daughter and, you know, they had this whole wedding with like, you know, 150 white doves were released and, you know, they had this, you know, kind of fairytale situation. And apparently, Berry said to Jermaine, like, Hey, you can go with your brothers and stay with me, whatever you want.And, you know, knowing Berry, I think he maybe didn't put it that delicately or, you know, that was kind of a huge break from Motown because you know, he had really taken the Jackson 5 under his wing. They used to have, Gordy versus Jackson family, baseball games. Michael Jackson would play catcher. It was very So, you know, I think Tito was like the big power hitter, is what I heard. but yeah, for, you know, I mean, these were two families that were really intricately linked. And I think ultimately it kind of came down to, you know, there was some creative control issues, but, you know, Joe Jackson was, pretty controlling, Berry Gordy was pretty controlling and at some point, you know, it just, I think it became impossible for them to coexist.And so, Joe kind of guided them over to Epic to get that big deal, but, you know, Jermaine. It wasn't obvious that Michael was going to be, you know, by far the superstar of all the Jacksons. And, you know, Jermaine did seem at the time to be like the one who had the most promising solo career, or at least it was, you know, pretty close.And, you know, he never really found his niche is a solo act and eventually it would go on to get back every night with his brothers and go on tours and that sort of thing.[00:31:22] Dan Runcie: I think that's a good distinction because people will often point to and think about what are the big nine and then he drops off the wall. This isn't what happened. There's a pretty big difference between those few years. No difference than anyone where naturally there's a difference between a 15 year, but there were others that experienced.So many of the artists that ended up leaving at that particular year old artist and a 19 year old artist. You're a completely different person at that point. And that's exactly what we ended up seeing with Michael. So missed opportunity for sure missed opportunities that Motown had, we'll get to miss opportunities in a minute, but you often hear people talk about them not being able to keep Michael, but to your point, the Jackson 5 leaving Motown in 1975, 76, isn't the same as.Them leaving in 1970 time ended up having greater,success once they were able to have a bit of freedom after leaving Motown, which was a bit unfortunate because obviously, I think it would have been great to see them continue that success under Berry Gordy's umbrella and continue to see them grow.But not everyone is going to be Stevie Wonder. Not everyone is there to say, Hey, I'm with you until the end. And I'm going to be riding with you during this entire journey. It just doesn't work that way. People have careers. No different. You see them today where people see a bigger opportunity and the grass is greener.They want to take advantage of that, especially if they don't feel like they are being put in the best position to thrive. So in the 80s, Motown is now officially in its transition recovery mode, trying to recapture what was there and we see a few things happen.So they start leading in on debarge. And a lot of people, DeBarge did have a pretty big hit with Rhythm of the Night, but I do think that they tried to make the DeBarge family replicate some of this Jackson family, where you had El DeBarge, and you had all of these others, but it just didn't quite click, at least in a mainstream way to that perspective, but then you did have Lionel Richie, who did end up having a pretty big career, especially with everything he had done since the, Commodores and, but then you also had Berry Gordy's son that they were also trying to work into the mix, who performed under the name Rockwell, who had had that song, somebody's watching me that Michael had sung the hook on.So you had a few things there, but just didn't exactly click because again, it's stuck in two models. Berry wanted to continue to have complete control over it. And the artists just didn't want that anymore. I think that worked when you were literally giving artists. No giving artists in a region of the country like Detroit a platform and opportunity, but they had no other options.But now they had leverage. Now they could go talk to mca Now they could go talk to CBS Epic and some of these other labels. So Berry's mentality just didn't work as much. And then by 1988 is when we see him transition on from the label, at least as the CEO level. And then we start to see the new blood come in to run the record label.[00:34:30] Zack Greenburg: Yeah. I mean, I think it is important to note that, you know, although you could characterize the 80s as sort of like musical decline era for Motown, you know, in the way that many artists are entrepreneurs, like, seem to be in a period of delays over some decade or whatever, they actually get much richer during that period of malaise, because what they had built before was so good.And there's still kind of like, they're finally cashing in on it, whereas maybe they didn't cash in on it when it first happened. But like, enough of the sort of like older, wealthier decision makers who can pay them more are like, finally getting hip to the fact that, you know, this is a big deal.So, I would definitely think about Motown that context and that, you know, when Berry was able to sell, you know, a huge chunk, of the company kind of like step back from it, that was after like a a period of time when Motown was not as hot as it had been.But you had things going on, like Motown 25 in 1983, that special. Put together, where MJ came back and reunited, with his brothers and the whole Motown crew and he had, you know, all these other artists, but that was actually the first time I think that MJ moonwalked, you know, sort of in public, like you know, he sort of like the popular debut of the moonwalk and it just really kind of, Created, so much buzz around that, that then kind of rubbed off on Motown and didn't really matter whether he wasn't on Motown anymore, but it just kind of gave a little more shine to the label and gave it sort of like, a relevance, I think that helped kind of carry through to the end of the 80s and helped get Berry Gordy, this really big payday.So, I wouldn't discount like You know, I don't know the sort of like delayed reaction that sort of the half life of fame or whatever you want to call it. But, there were still some of these moments that were created, that kept paying dividends as the time went on. I think[00:36:13] Dan Runcie: That's a fair point because he also sold at this smart time when right as we're seeing in this current era that we're recording, it's a very hot time for music asset transactions as were the late 80s and early 90s too. That's when you saw Geffen do many of the deals that he had done and Gordy. Did the same where I believe he made 61 million from the sale, or at least his portion of the sale in 1988, which is huge.You didn't see people, especially black business owners that fully owned everything being able to cash out at that level. So that's a good point. I'm glad that you mentioned that. And with this is when we start to see the transition of leadership. And we start to see a few things that do ring true.Where the first person that takes over is Gerald Busby, who was leading black music at MCA at the time. And even though Motown had had a bit of its malaise in the 1980s, MCA did not, in many ways, it was seen as the leader in black music. And Bubsy was able to. Have quite a good amount of success there with all of the work that he had done.the thing is though, he had started to run into some issues because he was in this weird dynamic where this company, Polygram had owned part of the label, as did Boston Ventures, his private equity group, and Bubsy was at odds with the folks at Boston Ventures about. some creative control. And he had this quote where he says he'd rather quit Motown president than see the label become a cash cow for a huge corporation trafficking off of nostalgia.And that was a quote that was said back in the 90s just thinking about how. Similar, some of those quotes now come to today. And this was someone who was largely credited from helping to say blast black music from that disco era. But unfortunately, I think a lot of those tensions that he had had, at the time just made life a little bit more difficult for him at Motown.So he eventually we Left. And while he was there, he was able to at least get a few things under. Like he was the one that had brought in voice to men. He had Queen Latifah there. He had Johnny Gill, who was another artist at the time that was quite popular, but maybe hadn't necessarily lived on in the way.And his dreams were, he wanted to have Motown cafes, the same way you had hard rock cafes. He wanted to have the young acts going and touring around at different places to recreate that vibe. And this is something that we'll get into. I think we see time and time again, where these leaders have all these dreams and visions for what they see.Motown can be, but because of the powers that be because of other things, they just can't quite get there to make it happen.[00:38:51] Zack Greenburg: Yeah. And I think that one of the things that set Motown apart early on, you know, as sets many startups apart early on, and many record companies are early on is that they were independent and they could do whatever they wanted.And, you know, Berry Gordy was, sort of like the unquestioned leader and, you know, things kind of, in the way that things kind of get done, let's say more efficiently, if not, more equitably in dictatorships, like he could just get shit done, move things around, have it happen immediately. And so when you started to have, you know, these corporate parents, parent companies, you know, you'd have to go through all these layers of approval to do anything.And, kind of like stop being able to be agile. and I think that's especially important in the music business when, you know, you have to. Not be reactive, but proactive, right? You have to be ahead of things. So, you know, if you're getting to a point where you're having to wait on approvals and things like that, you've already lost because you should have been out in front to begin with.[00:39:48] Dan Runcie: And this is something that I think plagued Motown time and time again, because Gordy didn't necessarily operate in this way. He had so many people that wanted to replicate what he did, but they didn't have the same parameters and the same leeway to make those decisions. As you mentioned, they're now working for corporations that now have their own vested interest.And to be frank, one of the tensions that we see often in music is that these brazen, bold leaders want to be able to take big swings and do things that are innovative and off the cuff. And these corporations are hard set pressed on efficiency. They don't want to see overspending. They don't want to see over commitments, or they want to be able to feel like this is being run in a strategic way.This is something that in the Interscope episode that we talked about, Jimmy Iveen struggled with this as well, even as recently as his tenure with Apple music. But this is one of those frequent tensions that happens with music executives. And we saw that continue with the person that replace Busby, which is Andre Harrell.We talked about him a bit in the Bad Boy episode, but Andre, of course, at this time was coming fresh off of Uptown Records where he was working in collaboration with MCA and he was able to build a little bit of his own fiefdom there where granted he still had people he had to answer to, but I think he had a pretty good relationship with the folks at MCA up until the end there.Then he goes to Motown and he sees this opportunity. And there's a few things that stick out about this because. As early as a year ago, he was starting to get rumored as to be the next person to then take over. But then he gets 250k as an initial announcement. He takes out this full page ad, New York Times.And then he has this ad that essentially says from Uptown to Motown, it's on. And it's him sitting in the back of the chair and you see a sweatshirt in the back. And people hated it. People grilled him. The way that they talked about him, the trades and even Russell Simmons and others coming in and giving him shit about it.He had pretty verbal flight fights with Clarence Avon, who was pretty powerful at the time. And Clarence even said he had swung on him at one particular point and was quite critical of him as well. There's this one quote that I think was really funny here, where this was from the Netflix documentary that was, The Black Godfather, which was about Clarence Avon.And, or actually, no, this is before this summer variety interview, but they talked about this as well. The doc, Clarence says, Andre and I didn't get along. And then he pointed to an image of the Motown boy band, 98 degrees. And Avon says, Andre wanted to send these white boys to Harlem to make them sound black.And I was like, you're out of your fucking mind. And it's a funny quote, because I do think that 98 degrees. Maybe didn't exactly have as many hits as they probably would have thought, but in Andre Harrell's defense, and sadly, but true, the mentality wasn't necessarily wrong because of the 90s, the most successful Motown act that you had was Boyz II Men, and we saw at the end of the decade that, what's that guy's name, the con artist that had the boy bands, Lou Pearlman, like, he literally modeled Backstreet Boys and NSYNC after How can I find white boys to men and make them see modern contemporary and make this happen?And that's how he was able to have success there. And that was before, what's his name? That was before Andre Harrell was really getting going. So he saw where things were going. But it just didn't click at the time. It just wasn't right. And obviously 90 degrees ends up having some decent success, but that's well after Andre Harrell had left the label.So he ended up leaving and the press was not kind to him. Literally headlines were. Andre Harrell gets fired from LA Times it's a type of headline that we probably don't see now when record label execs get fired in the same way. I think the industry is much more controlled in its PR sometimes to a fault, but it was very interesting to see that, come through. And another interesting quote from that, Lucian Grange had called the Andre Harrell at Motown relationship, an organ rejection. In terms of the relationship there.[00:43:56] Zack Greenburg: Yeah, no, I mean, and it's kind of interesting if you think about, you know, around that same time. What was going on in the music business, what would have been a great fit at Motown that didn't happen, would have been to sign Eminem, right? I mean, rather than try to do it with 98 degrees, if you really want to go and sort of like figure out what the kids are listening to, and do the thing where you have a white guy making black music, like. Holy shit. There's Eminem from Detroit, you know, doing his thing. But, you know, I think it took different kind of Andre to pull that one off.So, you know, in a way well played, you know, I mean, in a way it was like Andre was maybe Andre Harrell was taking some risks, but he wasn't taking quite enough. Like, he wasn't going far enough. He wasn't going way out enough on a limb. So, if you were really going to try to read that Motown, then that then go all the way at the same time, though, I would argue.I mean, if you look back, it's sort of like what worked with Motown and what did it, I think one of Motown's greatest attributes is also a limiting factor. And that's the thing we talked about before it, it's a label, but it's also a genre. And so if you have Motown making hip hop, it's like, wait a minute this isn't Motown. Like this isn't the genre of Motown. Like this is not the thing that I heard at my aunt's wedding, you know, this is something different. So, I think that they got kind of caught in between and I know that they've done all this stuff in hip hop over the years and, whatever, but it still doesn't feel like quite a fit because Motown, I mean that, you know, Motown was Motown, Motown wasn't hip hop and, you know, maybe if it had started getting into hip hop in the early days of hip hop.you know, it would have felt a little bit different about that, but, you know, hip hop is Def Jam, hip hop is is Roc-A-Fella hip hop is Bad Boy, and I just, you know, for all the efforts that Motown has made to get into hip hop, I think, it, has had a hard time, you know, fully sticking in the way that it would need to for Motown to replicate its, early success.[00:45:51] Dan Runcie: And one of the things that I think that a lot of these post Berry Gordy leaders struggled with was... As you mentioned, yeah, with Andre Harrell or others, there was the desire and opportunity to be able to do more, but the combination of the corporate structures in place that just didn't give them the same freedom that a Berry Gordy himself would have had.And then secondly. The business structure of how Motown itself as a company was set up didn't necessarily allow that because even things like radio or promotion and things like that, they still relied on other labels under the corporate umbrella, even to this day to get some of those things in place.So it really wasn't. Given the same freedom, even though their name, especially in the late 90s early two thousands was used in, especially back then it was the whole universal Republic Motown group or whatever the amalgamation was at the time. It really wasn't given the same freedom as some of those other record labels were.And I think we saw those challenges come in from time with some of the other leaders as well, because. Afterward, after, Harrell left, you had George Jackson who was there, felt like a bit more interim there for a couple of years. And then you had Kedar Mazenberg who was there late 90s early 2000.And that was a bit more than Neo soul vibe. You had India, Ari and a few others, but he has this quote that he gave to the independent, 2000 where he says, but we're not going to dominate the pop charts. Like we used to, how can we, there are too many other companies out there for that. So please don't compare it to the Motown of yesteryear.This is someone that is in the leadership role saying that exact quote. like How do you get past that? And then he talks again. I think they made a comparison to Def Jam where he said, you know, Def Jam, it took 10, 20 years to get to this established guidance, the way that you did with someone like a Lyor Cohen.And you essentially had that with Berry Gordy. But again, Lior was doing this before Def Jam ended up, you know, becoming under the whole Island Def Jam group and everything happened there. After that, you have Sylvia Roan, who was rising up the ranks herself. Still one of the most successful Black women in media and music right now.She's currently at Epic, but she had her time at Motown as well. And I'm going to get into her because I have something I want to say for missed opportunities there. And then you get more recently to the era of Ethiopia Habtamirian, who was there from 2011. Up until 2022, and she's 1 of those that I do feel like was put in a pretty hard spot because on 1 hand, she was able to essentially double the market share.Thanks in part to the partnership that she had made with hip hop through quality control to be able to help. them succeed And this is especially when the Migos are first starting to pop off, and then that transitions into the success of artists like Lil Yachty and Lil Baby and City Girls and others. But I think that also some of the overspending and things like that were quite critiqued.And especially from a PR perspective, the same way I was mentioning earlier when. Andre Harrell's challenges were bright front and center for the entire industry to read. Ethiopia's necessarily weren't in the same way. And even in some of the aspects of her leaving, the media had they called it a bit more reflective of, oh, Ethiopia has chosen to step down.When, yes, that's true, but there was also a pretty large severance package from Lucian and others at UMG. And again, I don't think she was necessarily given as much leadership either, because Motown was kind of, and still is kind of under capital, but now they've essentially moved it back. They had announced that she was solely the CEO back in 2021, but that was a pretty short lived.And to be honest, it felt like. Yeah. 1 of those announcements that the industry made in this, like, post George Floyd era to try to highlight and support black CEOs, which was great to see, but she's someone that's talented. You don't want to see her just become a tokenized person to have this. So, even though, like any CEO, I think there was things you could point out that she probably could have done differently.Still wasn't given the most leeway to begin with it. Now we're back in this point where what is Motown who's leading Motown. It's essentially the subsidiary under capital, but it's now a brand. And who knows where things are going to be. And it's quite unfortunate, but given everything that we've said up into this point, it also, isn't that surprising just given the dynamic.[00:50:21] Zack Greenburg: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think, you know, like you mentioned the the partnership with quality control. I mean, I think. That was a smart way to get more involved in hip hop because that was a brand that did have roots in hip hop more that, kind of resonated. and so when you sort of like, build as a partnership and look at it that way, it seems a little more credible than like,you know, Motown is doing hip hop now. so it's too bad that, you know, things kind of turned out the way they did, but, it's an interesting asset, right? I mean, it's a brand that has a lot of value. But it's not exactly clear, you know, how to sort of monetize it. And I think with Motown right now, it's like, it's probably about more, than the music, right?Like that's maybe where most of the monetization opportunity would be, whether it's, you know, Motown branded, you know, I don't know, films and, you know, I don't know, products, whatever the case may be. It resonates more, I think, than it does, as a record label. And people don't care so much about record labels anymore.Like we've talked about this, you know, in prior episodes, but it's not the same. You're not going to put on your record on a record player and see that big Motown logo on it, you're having something pop up your ear. And there, there's no visual, like, you don't know whether it's on Motown or Def Jam or Universal or Sony or, and you don't probably don't care.Right. I mean, and I think as things have kind of blurred together, genres are blurring together, you know, different, labels are gobbling each other up over the years, you know, people have just kind of like lost track and, you know, sort of like the idea of a label just isn't as important anymore.So, I do think that it's. a valuable piece of IP and, you know, there's things to do with it still. But, you know, I think, Berry Gordy certainly like squeezed, you know, all he could out of it and, did a great job of sort of ultimately profiting off of what it was that he built.[00:52:04] Dan Runcie: Right. Because what you have right now is this brand where they do have Motown the musical, which I do think has been pretty successful, both in the US and in Europe and elsewhere that it's traveled. but that's it. I mean, quality control partnership doesn't exist in the same way since they've been now bought by hive.Hopefully, Ethiopia and those folks were able to at least retain some type of revenue for helping to set the framework to make that deal possible, but we'll see I, where I landed with this is that. The way to quote unquote, I don't want to say save Motown because that can just seems like such a blanket statement, but if you were trying to improve it from its current inevitable state, it would be finding a way to spin off the asset and the catalog from Universal and having it be in the hands of someone else who can make it work.The challenge is Universal isn't going to want to give that asset up. That's one of their most valuable back catalogs that they have. So. I was thinking through it in my mind, the same way that you have someone like a Tyler Perry, who are these modern moguls that have a bit of that Berry Gordy vibe to them.The way that Tyler Perry is, we'll see whether or not he ends up buying BET, but could that same mentality be applied to a record label? And then with that, you're able to then build up your own promotion. You're able to build up your own talent, and then you take things in a slightly different way. I still don't think that guarantees success, but at least you shake things up in a particular way and you still give it that black ownership mentality.You give it a bit more of that independence and the autonomy and you could potentially see what happens because. We all know what the continued fate is as a legacy entity of a catalog holder that it would be under the UMG umbrella.[00:53:50] Zack Greenburg: Yeah, a hundred percent. Totally agree.[00:53:52] Dan Runcie: And with that, I think it would be a good time to dig into some of these categories here. So what do you think is the biggest, this will may be obvious, but what do you think is the biggest signing that they've done or that Motown ever did?[00:54:04] Zack Greenburg: Yeah, I think I'd go with the Jackson 5 I mean, you know, although Motown did not ultimately profit off of MJ's solo career, in the way that it would have if it had retained him for a solo career, Motown did profit off of the association as he became the biggest musical star, but basically entertainer of any kind in the world.and, you know, going back to the Motown 25 moment, you know, other kinds of associations. So I would say like good process. Not really a bad outcome, but like signing the Jackson 5 could have been the path to also signing Michael Jackson as a solo artist. And then, you know, just because that didn't work out in the end, does it mean that that wasn't a huge signing for them?[00:54:47] Dan Runcie: Yeah, I was going to say Jackson 5 or Stevie Wonder, which is the one that I had and I say him because of the longevity because even when times were rough, Stevie Wonder still had arguably his best decade in the 70s But, he had a number of them that were there, especially in the seventies. I think that was his strongest run and he stayed through. And I think that in a lot of ways helped bridge the gap during some of those low moments when other artists did come and went. Did come and go. So that was the one I had there.What do you have as the best business move?[00:55:18] Zack Greenburg: Well, okay. This is something we haven't talked about and maybe we should talk about it but more, but here we are, we'll talk about it more now. I think it was Berry Gordy setting up, his publishing company. So, I mean, maybe that's cheating a little bit because it was outside of, Motown itself but of He set up Joe bet, publishing, you know, pretty early on. And he didn't realize, you know, his big payday for it until later 1997, but he sold it for 132 million for just for half of it. so the EMI, and then he sold another 30% for I think 109 million. And then he sold the rest of it for, something like 80 million in, what was that?It was like 2004. So, you know, we're talking like over a quarter billion dollars and that's not inflation adjusted. you know, for the publishing and that, you know, that dwarfed whatever he got for Motown itself. So, and, you know, think about if he held onto it until, the recent publishing Bonanza, I mean, I mean, it could have been close to a billion dollar catalog, right?I mean, you know, there's nothing, really like it out there. So. He was always very smart about ownership and I think Michael Jackson knew that and, you know, studied him as a kid growing up. And that's kind of what convinced Michael to want to own his own work, and also in the Beatles work, which then became the basis of Sony ATV.And that was another massive catalog. So, yeah, I think the publishing side of it definitely gets overlooked and, you know, was ultimately the most, financially valuable part. But, even though it was sort of a separate. Company, you know, I would argue it, for sure it wouldn't have happened without Motown happening.[00:56:51] Dan Runcie: That's a great one. And I'm glad you mentioned that. Cause definitely could get overlooked and doesn't get talked enough about in this whole business. I think publishing in general is something that people don't understand. And so they just don't, dig into it, but he wrote it. I mean, he owned everything.And obviously when you own the value. When you own something that valuable, it has its assets. And I think why publishing continues to be so valuable in the industry i

✋JANGAN LUPA CUCI TANGAN DAN SUBCRIBE-NYA‼️ 01:26 Daftar Google Finance https://www.google.com/finance/portfolio?hl=en 04:39 Jelajahi Trend Pasar https://www.google.com/finance/markets/most-active?hl=en "Google Finance merupakan situs yang menampilkan informasi finansial perusahaan-perusahaan Amerika Serikat, berisi beragam informasi mulai dari profil bisnis dan pergerakan saham, kebijakan-kebijakan keuangan, informasi eksekutif, tabel interaktif, portofolio perusahan sampai berita-berita terkait perkembangan mereka." --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/jurnallembu/message

En el top tecnología de hoy te contamos sobre la relevancia de hacer que la conectividad sea accesible para todos. Por otro lado, Microsoft podría ganar el visto bueno para adquirir Activision, y aquí está el tutorial para utilizar Google Finance.  Si quieres saber más sobre estas noticias, suscríbete a los newsletters de Expansión, entra a Expansión.mx/tecnologia y síguenos en nuestras redes @ExpansionMx, @Gin_jabbab, @Guarolf_  y @Eresinaeresina. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vince McMahon was the most powerful man in the wrestling business. In 2022, he resigned in disgrace as WWE's chief executive in light of multiple sexual misconduct allegations. These are the events that led up to and followed one of the biggest news stories in wrestling history.YouTube version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkA1RMsBTWE

Vince McMahon was the most powerful man in the wrestling business. In 2022, he resigned in disgrace as WWE's chief executive in light of multiple sexual misconduct allegations. These are the events that led up to and followed one of the biggest news stories in wrestling history.YouTube version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkA1RMsBTWE

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Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% )Episode: [Best] Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & MonasticismRelease date: 2022-12-01Perhaps the most interesting episode so far.Byrne Hobart writes at thediff.co, analyzing inflections in finance and tech.He explains:* What happened at FTX* How drugs have induced past financial bubbles* How to be long AI while hedging Taiwan invasion* Whether Musk's Twitter takeover will succeed* Where to find the next Napoleon and LBJ* & ultimately how society can deal with those who seek domination and recognitionWatch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.If you enjoy this episode, I would be super grateful if you shared it. Post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group chats, and throw it up wherever else people might find it. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.A huge thanks to Graham Bessellieu for editing this podcast.Timestamps: (0:00:50) - What the hell happened at FTX?(0:07:03) - How SBF Faked Being a Genius:  (0:12:23) - Drugs Explain Financial Bubbles (0:17:12) - On Founder Physiognomy (0:21:02) - Indexing Parental Involvement in Raising Talented Kids (0:30:35) - Where are all the Caro-level Biographers? (0:39:03) - Where are today's Great Founders?  (0:49:05) - Micro Writing -> Macro Understanding (0:52:04) - Elon's Twitter Takeover (1:01:28) - Does Big Tech & West Have Great People? (1:12:10) - Philosophical Fanatics and Effective Altruism  (1:17:54) - What Great Founders Have In Common (1:20:24) - Thinkers vs. Analyzers (1:26:17) - Taiwan Invasion bets & AI Timelines TranscriptAutogenerated - will not be perfectly accurate.Dwarkesh Patel 0:00:00Okay, today I have the pleasure of interviewing Bern Hobart again for the second time now, who writes at thediff.co. The way I would describe Bern is every time I have a question about a concept or an event in finance, I Google the name of that event or concept into Google, and then I'd put in Bern Hobart at the end of that search query. And nine times out of 10, it's the best thing I've read about that topic. And it's just so interesting. It's just like the most schizophrenic and galaxy brain it takes about like how, you know, the discourses of, you know, Machiavelli's discourses relate to big tech or like how source of serial reflexivity explains hiring in finance and tech. So just very interesting stuff. I'm glad to have him back on again.Byrne Hobart 0:00:47Yeah, great to be back. Awesome.Dwarkesh Patel 0:00:50Okay. So first, I really want to jump into the FTX saga. What the hell happened? Let me just like leave an open ended question for you.Byrne Hobart 0:00:59Yeah, so I think the first thing to say is that there's a lot we don't know. There's a lot we may never know, because so many of the decisions at FTX were made through self like auto deleting encrypted chat. So like there are some holes we will never be able to fill in. The lack of accounting is also going to make it tough. Like basically, I think you can tell a bunch of different stories here. The really obvious one is fraud. And you can debate over exactly when it started, like one version of the story, which is getting some currency is that SPF had this entity Alameda, and it was supposed to be this really hot crypto trading fund, but maybe it was a Ponzi scheme all along. And then maybe at some point that Ponzi scheme started to run short on cash. So he decided to start an exchange and the exchange got more cash, and then he used the cash to pay off previous bachelors, whatever. I think that's one version. And then kind of the maximally exculpatory version, which actually is still really bad is Alameda was a real company. They really made money trading. They took tons of risks. And SPF has talked about why he thinks that's a good thing, that FTX cut some corners when they were raising money and that they had really bad internal accounting. And that basically the extended entity of Alameda and FTX sort of lost track of whose money was where and it ended up with Alameda spending FTX customer money, which I think is like, one way to look at that is like, if you think, okay, fraud is like twice as bad as just incompetently losing money. Well, it's not as if we had a $4 billion fraud instead of $8 billion fraud, everyone would be like, well, that's fine. That's normal. Like, why are you giving sky high time? It's bad no matter what. Running a big company that is systemically important in crypto and then having that company completely vaporize over the course of a couple of days, really, really bad and worth understanding what happened. But it's partly worth understanding what happened because there are just different solutions that present themselves depending on what you think the story is. Like if the story is fraud, it's actually a lot harder to solve because there are just a lot of people who are willing and able to commit fraud and to lie. If the story is bad accounting, then that's actually a lot more solvable because then you could say things like, the solution is make sure you never invest in a crypto exchange that doesn't have a real auditor and make sure that they have their proof of reserves calculation and it's happening consistently and that you can audit that. There are different solution sets. And then I think the actual story is going to be somewhere in the middle of extreme risk tolerance plus extremely poor accounting plus fraud at some point. But I suspect the fraud actually happened pretty late. If it happened, which I think there's like 80, 90% chance that there was some level of fraud versus pure incompetence. But if so, I think may have happened fairly late in the story and as kind of a last desperate move. I think part of what drives the response to what happened with FTX and Alameda is that if you think the story is pure fraud, it's very easy to say you would never do that. I can say very easily, I would definitely never start a Ponzi scheme and then start another bigger Ponzi scheme to pay off the first Ponzi scheme. That's not me. That's not most people. But I think if you draw the scenario where they discover at some point like a couple months ago or even a month ago, they realized, hey, we actually there's a billion dollars plus that was supposed to be customer money, but we thought it was Alameda money and we actually spent it and now it's gone. We've lost it. What would you do in that circumstance? And I think the ideal answer is, well, I'd immediately come clean and step down and commit myself to getting everyone paid back and made whole. And I think there's also the possibility that the realistic answer is more like, well, I would scramble and try to make sure that that didn't cause the company to collapse and try to pick up later. And so at that point, you've sort of backed your way into fraud through earlier episodes of incompetence. But I think like one of the problems with the fraud story is frauds have to be good at accounting because they have to like, you know, there's very rough schematic sense. They have to be twice as good at accounting as everybody else, because not only do they have to have the real books that tell them how much money the business has and whether or not the next check they're at will bounce, but they have to have the fake set of books and they have to have a way to make those tie out with one another. So they actually like frauds, accounting frauds tend to be fairly sophisticated. They tend to really dive into edge cases. I was reading up on MF Global, which was a big futures brokerage that collapsed in part because they were dipping into customer funds and making some investments they shouldn't have. And they did a lot of clever and shady stuff. Like one of the things they would do is there was one point where they were transferring money at the last minute out of their consumer, out of their customer funds in order to make margin calls. And what they would do is they would send the wire from the customer account to a different company account. And they'd send it a couple of minutes before the wires closed for the night. And then they would send this email right after the wires closed saying, Hey, we just realized we set this transfer fraud account got to reverse tomorrow. So that gave them at least one night of enough liquidity to survive. Now, you can only do that kind of fraud if you are actually keeping really close track of where your money is, where it's supposed to be, what the rules are, so that you know exactly how to break those rules. I don't think FDX was in any position to commit that kind of fraud. I think that if they tried to do something like that, like they wire the money from an account that didn't have any money in it or something or send it to the wrong account. There are these stories about them accidentally burning a bunch of USDC by sending it to an address that didn't exist or something like that. The operational slip ups actually make it harder for them to have committed fraud. And it's unquestionable at this point that their record keeping was very bad.Dwarkesh Patel 0:07:03Yeah, to your point about the fraud being harder. I mean, it's like a classic story about if you just tell the truth, it's just gonna be much easier for you. You just don't have to keep track with that many things. But the one thing I've been thinking about, I interviewed him for like an hour. And before that, I tried to do quite a bit of research into how FDX worked and what was going on. And I had this impression that this guy was like the most competent genius that had ever graced finance. And this was like a common impression. This wasn't just... And then, but it turns out that, you know, they were like, it just like out of sheer incompetency loses track of billions of dollars, the internal operations, it just like him putting together spreadsheets and throwing them around and putting emojis on slack messages, asking for payments. And I just like, I want to understand how it is that this guy put out the impression out there that he is just hyper competent. And it turns out that it's like the opposite. It's not even that he's mediocre. It's the opposite.Byrne Hobart 0:08:09Right. Yeah. So I think you can tell a couple stories there, like one story. And I know I've been saying a lot, like you can tell multiple stories. There are multiple stories that fit the facts. We have lots of different weird things to explain and therefore many different weird explanations that fit them. So I think one version is, okay, he's never all that smart and decided that he could just play up this weird, you know, eccentric genius thing. And that would be able to get away with it. And there are these anecdotes about how someone told him to cut his hair and he said, no, I have to look kind of crazy for this. And so that fits in. And it is kind of an MIT thing to do that, to play up your eccentricity because you know there are these super brilliant, very eccentric people and you can be like them. It's kind of like, a lot of people, they read about Steve Jobs and they're like, well, the secret to success is be this brilliant perfectionist who can always see the future and also be just a giant a*****e to everyone you meet. And I'm going to try to do both of those things. And it turns out one of those is really, really easy to do. And then one of them is really, really hard and you have to do both to be Steve Jobs. But you can sort of give this surface level impression of Jobsy and this by just being really obnoxious to everyone. So I think some of it is that. But the other is that if you get really good at just very narrow domain specific stuff, you might miss what other stuff people have to be good at for that skill set to be valuable. And so I think thinking about his previous background where he worked at a prop trading firm and seemed to do well there. It's Jane Street. They're very, very selective with who they hire, very hard to get in and they're very profitable. So good to get in. It's entirely possible that part of what happened was just that Jane Street has its operations people, they have their trading people. And it may there may have been enough siloing within that, that if your job is just identify discrepancies in ETF prices and take advantage of them, you don't actually have to know things like how do we figure out which counterparties are credit worthy? How do we make sure we have enough liquidity? How do we have backup plans upon backup plans upon backup plans in case something goes wrong with our liquidity situation? Because part of the Jane Street model seems to be there. They're very, very opaque, but like very opaque in terms of their trading operations. But part of the model seems to be that they want to be the trader who is there and trading and making a market when everything fell apart. And what that means is that like the way you make the most money in trading is when markets are insanely volatile, volume is very, very high, and you're still trading. But the reason that markets get really volatile when prices collapse and there's a lot of trade going on is that other people who would love to be trading can't trade because maybe the broker they use is suddenly insolvent and they can't get to a new broker, their money is frozen. So if you're planning to be there when everybody else is out of the market, then you have to have lots and lots of contingency plans. And it's not enough to buy lots of deep out of the money put options as Jane Street does. You also have to make sure that you're buying those options from counterparty who will actually send you the money when you need it or that you want to structure those things so the actual cash gets to your account at the time that needs to be there. And that maybe is something that a prop trader should not be spending most of their time thinking about. Like, it's one of those things where it's like, if you own a house and you like if over the last 24 hours, you learned a whole lot about electrical wiring, or you learned a whole lot about how plumbing works or how septic tanks work, like, that's not good. That means something very, very bad happened in your house. And it could be nice to be an expert on those things. But if you suddenly became an expert, it's because somebody else wasn't doing their job. So I think you could you could be a trader like that where they can be very good at the finding little pricing discrepancies thing and have just no awareness of what the operation stuff is, especially because the better the operations team is, the less anyone else needs to be aware of them. Like they like you only email them when something is going wrong. So if nothing is going wrong, you never email them and then you forget they exist.Dwarkesh Patel 0:12:23Yeah, yeah, no, that's a good point. In fact, in the interview I did of him, he mentioned that I asked him what is the difference between Jane Street and FTX. And he mentioned that at Jane Street, there was like this button he could press to like buy. And all that's all the intermediaries, all the servers, it was just taken care of. And what was really funny is then he said, and just getting a bank account and he goes, and let's talk about that. Just getting a bank account is so hard when you're in an infinite. It apparently turns out it's so hard that you might have like commingled funds because you couldn't manage to separate them out. Yeah, no, that's crazy. You had this really interesting take. I think one point we were talking about how every single market crash can be explained by the drug that was common in the industry at the time. And we finally achieved like the hypergrade meth stage of I forgot the name of like that patch you was taking, but it's like stronger than Adderall or whatever.Byrne Hobart 0:13:23So it was, I think it's saying every crash can be explained by the drug they're taking at the time. That takes a little, but I do think that the impact of drugs, of new drugs on financial markets is underrated. And you can have examples of this going back pretty far. Like there is some connection between caffeine consumption and like extroversion and risk taking like you temporarily get a little bit more willing to do deals when you consume caffeine and in Lloyd's of London before it was this insurance consortium, it was a coffee shop. It was Lloyd's coffee shop. So you do have some history of coffee shops being associated with financial centers. And then you have to zoom forward because we just haven't had that many novel stimulants, I guess depressants, deliriums, whatever, like other drug categories probably just don't lead to that much financial activity. Like I don't know how someone would trade differently or invest differently if they had a really strong acid trip or took ecstasy or something. But the stimulants where people can just consistently reuse them, they keep people alert, they make them active and wanting to do things. It seems like stimulants would have a connection to financial markets. So yeah, that theory is like if you look at the 1980s where there were a lot of these hostile takeover deals where someone would find a company that's underperforming and when you look at the spreadsheets and say this company is underperforming, what you're often looking at is a story that is more like this company believes that they have this social obligation to the community where people work and that they have an obligation to give their customers a fairly priced product and maybe they give them really good customer service that doesn't really pay for itself and it's the right thing to do. Well maybe especially if you are a coke head with kind of coke head morality, you decide well that's not the right thing to do at all. You should actually just take the money and we should fire these people and replace them with cheaper employees. So you know levering up a company and then like levering up in order to buy out a bigger company and then firing everyone and you know shutting down the pension plan and distributing the surplus to shareholders like it is just very standard coke head behavior. Whereas if you look at the mortgage backed securities boom and structured products generally in the mid-2000s, the way that people made money in that was just by being very very detail oriented and being able to make these incredibly fine grained distinctions between different products that were basically similar but one of them pays 5.7% and one of them pays 5.75% and if you lever up that difference enough times you're actually making really good money consistently. It's super boring but maybe with enough Adderall it's actually very tolerable work that you can enjoy. So I do think that just like within stimulants the difference between short acting stimulants and long acting stimulants does mean the difference between a hostile takeover boom and a structured products boom. And then yeah there's I think the drug is called M-sem or something which is like a Parkinson's treatment and there's some evidence from pretty small sample size studies that one of the side effects of this drug is compulsive gambling. So yeah and the drug story there have been very very fun tweets about this claim and then there have been these official denials from the company doctor on the other hand if you're a company that has a company doctor maybe that says something about the level of medication you're consuming and maybe the company doctor's job is partly to say as a doctor I can assure you I would never give someone three times the normal dose of Adderall just because their boss hired me to do that specifically. I think dealers don't exactly have patient confidentiality norms, doctors do so maybe you hire a doctor instead of a dealer specifically to get that plausible deniability.Dwarkesh Patel 0:17:12Other than drugs I also want to ask you about the phenotype of the founder. You wrote a post I think it was like just a couple of weeks before this crash happened where you were pointing out that this idea of a founder who comes in shorts and a t-shirt and a crazy haircut. By the way so FTX had a barber who would come in every Tuesday to cut everybody's hair it might have been Thursday and that so he could have just like sat in line and gotten his haircut like that was that was completely unnecessary the way he dressed and it was like very purposeful. But yeah so if that archetype of a founder who's in a t-shirt and shorts if that's been priced in and that's beta instead of alpha now what is the new phenotype and physiognomy of the founder? Where are you looking for alpha?Byrne Hobart 0:17:58Well I guess I would draw the distinction between like the physical type of someone versus their presentation and their dress. Yeah I don't know I'm sure someone could run some interesting numbers on that but I don't have a good sense of what exactly they'd get from that but in terms of you know how people public people publicly present that present themselves my guess is that yeah there will be this swing towards investing in people who look a little bit more formal a little bit more boring and these things are somewhat cyclical. Like I think part of you know part of the norm on investing in or you know treating basically treating the suit as a negative signal is that a lot of investors have this view that when the MBAs come into an industry a lot of the alpha is gone and it is true that MBAs at least you know there's it's like a decent market timing signal apparently that if a lot of people from Harvard Business School go straight into some field that field is probably peaking. So there's a little bit to that where the suit is some example of conformity on the other hand wearing a suit in Silicon Valley is an example of non-conformity and I guess outside of outside of New York within the US most of the time wearing a suit as a tech company founder would be this weird sign that you know you're either like you don't know what you're doing you don't know what the right signals are or you know you're about to testify to Congress and that's why you have a suit now. You're not not generally a great sign but maybe it is a sign that you are willing to do some more conformist things and that you could pay attention to details the details are boring and also that you are putting some you're making some kind of financial investment in in that particular appearance. So yeah I would I would guess that there is there will be a tilt away from the hyper informal founders but I also think that if you treat that hyper informality as either this attempt to gain the system and just say like I'm going to be as much I'm going to try to remind people of Mark Zuckerberg circa 2005 as much as possible so I can raise money and pretend to be the next big thing that is that's one thing people are signaling and then the other thing is they're just accidentally signaling total indifference to anything except the thing they're working on and maybe that's a good thing but maybe maybe it's a good thing in unregulated domains and then a really really bad thing in regulated domains like if you're investing in a medical devices company you you probably don't want a founder who just cannot focus on anything except the product because there are rules they have to follow and you know norms and things and yeah it gets bad if all they're focused on is this one element you know if the hyper focus is like just right perfectly calibrated that's good but then maybe maybe adjusting your appearances this way to say that you have correctly calibrated your hyper focus and you're going to get one thing right and it's going to be really really right like you're going to get things right they're going to be really really right and you've identified what things matter what things don't.Dwarkesh Patel 0:21:02Yeah you'll lose track of your bank accounts. That's the dress itself but I also want to ask about the other characteristics you had this really interesting point in that blog post about how you know when you try to scout for talent when the talent is young you're over indexing for parental involvement and I'm curious if you had to identify somebody who had to be under the age of 18 or under the age of 20 what is the metric you're looking at that least indexes for parental involvement where they're being forced or encouraged by their parents to do it?Byrne Hobart 0:21:35I think the closest you could get is something that is either totally illegible to the parent's status like understanding of status or something that is actively low status and it's hard to hard to enumerate those and not just get swamped in well should this thing be low status the high status is actually terrible to say that you ever want to hire someone who was really good at x for some value of x but I do think that you so basically the origin of that point was that I was arguing that when you if you look at people who are at some percentile and they're in their 20s or 30s like a lot of like at a high percentile like a lot of it has to be that they have some combination of talent and have tried really hard there's probably been some element of luck but over time the luck starts to starts to wash out hopefully but the younger you go and this is probably just my experience of having kids like if you talk to your kids every day about multiplication they will start doing multiplication at a pretty early age and it's not that they are you know really really smart and they got to multiplication a couple years early it's that you push them in that direction and they were able to do it early so like the earlier you go the more you are over indexing on what the parents did what they emphasized and also what they told the kids was just part of the script and there are anecdotes about this from none of the specifics coming to mind but I remember anecdotes about people who grew up in lower middle class or below circumstances but would have one distant relative who owned a business and that made them aware that they could own a business and this is like a thing they could do it's part of the script now and that wasn't the only reason that they would have started business but it could be a reason that they decided to do that when they did and you have to imagine that for everyone who had one uncle who owned a scrap dealer or something that maybe there are five or ten or fifty people who grew up in similar circumstances had a similar level of innate ability and just didn't have anyone in their social circle who demonstrated to them that this was something you could actually do so I think like getting getting back to the talent identification problem but part of my thesis there was that it's it's really hard and it's getting harder that you had Y Combinator going after the relatively young talent versus what the medium BC was going after when YC started and then stuff like Pioneer and Emergent Ventures is going even younger and the younger you get the more it is this luck driven thing that is about what they got exposed to with the exception of prodigies so I'd like to think that if I encountered an eight-year-old Mozart I would be able to identify this person as just an extraordinary talent where like even if their parents were making them practice ten hours a day they couldn't be that good without talent and maybe something similar with the Polar Sisters where okay if I you know encounter a six-year-old who can routinely beat me at chess and so I go Google some you know read some chess books and then go back and try to beat them again and they're actually better and they're laughing at me and things like at some point you decide that this is actually natural talent but there's for a lot of other domains there's just so much room for parents to push one thing and do some combination of their kids talent and their own emphasis to get their kids really good at it and that's very hard to adjust for especially because if you ask the parents they're going to underestimate how much they overemphasize things because to them this is just a normal thing that everyone should be interested in and so you won't you won't get a good signal from asking parents and then you won't get a good signal from asking other people because they don't know how this family spends time at home and you know if if the medium family has more more YouTube and Netflix time and less you know less math practice time that family's just going to assume it's pretty pretty much their behavior is normal.Dwarkesh Patel 0:25:25It's a bit confusing because you also want to potentially include parental involvement in your estimate of how good this person will end up being if you think for example that giving somebody a shot to get started programming early is actually a big factor in putting them on that sort of like loop where they get better by practicing and they enjoy it more so on you might expect momentum more than mean reversion in that kind of like early start.Byrne Hobart 0:25:54Sure so I think part of part of what this gets to is the question of what are you optimizing for when you're doing a talent search and I think this is maybe one reason there could be some alpha left in talent search among people who are super young is that a lot of the academic institutions that are doing some form of talent search what they're pretty much optimizing for is how does this person do over the next year so you know if someone is a math prodigy and they get to join the math team at that school the school is not trying to optimize for will this person be proving novel theorems when they're 25 it's really will this seven-year-old be doing you know algebra by the time they're eight and that's that is still very tied to parental involvement especially once you know parents like kids they like structure and if you tell them this is the appropriate next thing to do with your kid then they're more likely to do it so you can post on that momentum for a while but what I think you the trap you can run into is that you identify people who are like 95th percentile talent with 99th percentile just super aggressive parents and that combination gets them to 99th percentile performance until they leave home and then they never do whatever that thing is ever again because they didn't really like it it was just something their parents pressured them into now maybe the ideal would be you get 99 percentile on both so the parents are putting them on this trajectory but the parents are actually aiming you know a very powerful rocket ship and it's going to go right in the right direction which is ideal and I think there's a there's a reasonable possibility that like I think there are there's like some level of just imprinting that young kids have where a lot of kids learn about programming when they're very young and that's something that they do from a very very early age and then it becomes the thing that they work on for their entire career obviously that has to be fairly new because it's not like they're you know from like anyone who was born before 1970 just had this constant yearning to program computers and could never satisfy it like those kids found something else to do maybe a generation before it was repairing transistor radios like mine did when he was a kid and maybe a century before that it was experimenting by building little internal combustion engines and seeing whether or not they explode like Henry Ford did with his friends at school and maybe before that like the earlier you got the harder it gets to really map these activities to anything concrete that we understand and can relate to but there's there's probably some extent to which you can you can sort of direct kids into whatever the modern instantiation of this long-term enduring tendency is and I guess one so one interesting example of that I've been reading the Robert Caro LBJ biography and there's this bit towards the end of the first volume where LBJ is put in charge of this fundraising organization for Democrats in Congress and when you read about it he sounds like a traitor he sounds like someone who was just born to be slinging currency derivatives or something because he is constantly on the phone constantly picking up rumors constantly sending money here and there and everywhere else and he's like always sending money overnight and then sending someone a telegram the day before saying you're going to get a package from Lyndon Baines Johnson and you're welcome so he's like he's doing this thing where he's constantly relentlessly optimizing every little tiny detail of some very complicated process clearly requires enormous working memory requires a very strong basically a very strong poker face like he has to be able to differentiate between someone who is begging for money because they are at they're pulling at 49% and with a little bit more money for newspaper ads they get to 50.1% versus someone who just wants the money or just is constantly freaking out by their nature so it requires a lot of the same character traits but 1930s were just not a great time to go to Wall Street maybe if LBJ had been born at a slightly different time that's that's just what he would have done and it would have been a very successful private equity executive or something but sometimes those these general skills they can translate into a lot of different areas and they get honed into very specific skills through through deliberate practice in those areas so if you have that combination of natural tendency and some level of motivation which in LBJ's case his dad was also a politician so he had this example of this is part of the life script you can't do it but he also had the example of his dad was broke after a while and so he he had this example of what not to do and ended up making good money for himself in addition to his political career yeah yeahDwarkesh Patel 0:30:35I'm glad you brought up the biography I'm reading it right now as well and the other biography by Robert Caro the power broker just for the audience the last episode or the second to last episode in the feed is we go deep into deep into that biography and talk about why it might be inaccurate in certain respects but what is what it is accurate and I think what Caro has a genius in is talking about the personalities of these great great men about the people who have really shaped their cities or their countries for decades and centuries there's many places where I mean I'm sure this is true for you if you understand like the economics of an issue he's talking about there's a lot to be left to care his explanation but the actual like the sort of breakdown of the personalities is just so fascinating and worth a reading care for but you know come to think of it so maybe the difference between the cases where you want to price in the parents involvement and the ones where you don't is where in situations like maybe being a politician where it really is about building a network building know-how building this sort of inarticulable knowledge from an early age it might be the case that in those situations just having connections and having parental involvement gets you far but if it's like becoming a programmer sure you'll like have done data structures by the time you're 16 but eventually you'll get to the point where you know everybody knows the basics and now you actually how to do interesting and cool things in computer science and now you're like a 95th percentile of spatial reasoning IQ is not going to get you that far but let me ask you about the care of biography because you had a really interesting comment that I've been warning you about as well in your in your review of the book or in your comment about the book you said it's worth speculating on how many lbg level figures exist today perhaps in domains outside of politics and how many caro level biographers there are who could do them justice so do you have some idea of who these figures are or if not that at least what areas you'd expect them to beByrne Hobart 0:32:34in I think a lot of people who are close to that tier and have some of the same personality types are in sales and corporate development and stuff like that where they you know they're they're building a big network they are constantly building out this giant levered balance sheet of favors you know favors out to them favors they owe to other people and like all forms of leverage it does allow you to grow a lot faster but you occasionally want these big big blowups so that's that's one place I would look I think if you try to look at the more you know pure executive founder types then it gets harder to find someone who would have exactly that kind of personality it's like part of what made lbj's methods work was that he was adjacent to a bunch of these really big institutions and he could sort of siphon off some of the power that these institutions had and in some cases could make them more powerful so I'm about a third of the way through master of the senate right now so it's it's just getting to the point where he's really getting cooking and really making the senate more more effective than it used to be and also making it an organization where someone where it's less seniority based so you kind of you need to be attached to something much bigger than yourself for that particular skill set to work really well that said you could have a really big impact because it is it's another form of leverage so if you are one of a hundred senators or I guess at the point at that point it was 96 senators and you're you're able to exert a lot more influence and be you know be the equivalent to 40 senators for example then you can get a whole lot done because it's it's the us senate but if you have that same kind of skill set and you're the ceo of your company well you're you're already in front of the company like there's only so much extra force you can exert so you you kind of see a figure with exactly that kind of personality trait in a case where there are big institutions that have slowed down somewhat and this is another interesting point that is raised early master at the senate is that the senate was getting old and if you look at these long-term charts of average age of politicians we're we're definitely in a bull market for extremely extremely old politicians in the u.s right now but we've gone through cycles before and one of the things that that tends to cause a reset is the war where wars among other things cause this huge reset in social capital so the people who made mistakes in the early stages all get discredited and then the the social bonds that people forge from actually fighting alongside one another and the the prestige you get from actually being part of the winning side that is very hard to replicate and so you end up with much younger people in much you know in positions of a lot more power whereas the the way that that worked a decade and a half earlier was the 1930s there just weren't a lot of organizations that were hiring heavily and looking for really ambitious young people who are going to shake things up but the u.s government was so that's that's how lbj got in and started on his path was that the new deal created these big programs like the national youth administration and they needed people like johnson to to run them so when you look at um you look at an industry that is aging it's usually an industry where um ambitious people stay away from it like they recognize it's becoming more seniority focused and there's just less going on but there becomes this huge opportunity when the aging stops because a bunch of people either retire or they get discredited and have to leave and suddenly the average age of the industry ratchets down and you can basically look at the set of opportunities that were missed over the previous decade for example because um because the industry was like the whatever this institution was was too risk averse you you get to take all of those opportunities at once so you have tons and tons of low-hanging fruit when that shift happens so i think that's that's the other thing to look for is look for cases where there's some some institution some part of the economy or society that has just been slowing down for a long time clearly getting to the limit of whatever its current operating model is hasn't found a new model and there's someone young and disruptive who's just entering it so i mean maybe maybe the place to look for the next lbj is um someone doing independent films and someone who looks at the top box office results and sees that everything is a spin-off of a spin-off of a spin-off and it's you know 50 percent marvel and says this is disgusting we have to destroy it and i'm going to build something completely different like maybe that person is actually the kind of lbj archetype now the other half of this question is the caro archetype and part of what i found fun about this was that um i felt like caro had this kind of um like he was kind of disgusted with himself when he realized how similar his some of his methods were to lbj's because he's writing this story about this guy who's will do anything to make a sort of friendship but it's really a fake friendship just to accomplish his goals and he's constantly doing doing the reading that other people aren't doing and doing the work and making the calls and reiterating and reiterating iterating just endless patience and then you read about how caro works and he does things like moves to dc for a while talks to everyone in dc befriends people goes to um texas talks you know moves to the hill country and gets to know people there he has these anecdotes in the book because the book is like um it's sort of has these hints of gonzo journalism where sometimes caro will just narrate it's that he'll he will go from here's what happened in 1946 to here's what happened to me in the 70s while i was talking to this guy about what he did in 1946 and sometimes he he will basically come out and say i waited until the person who paid this bribe had alzheimer's and then i asked him if he remembered paying the bribe and he remembered that he did it and didn't remember he wasn't supposed to say it so that's how i know and um there's this line that caro keeps quoting from lbj which i think was from lbj's speech coach days or speech like debate team coach days where his line was if you do everything you will win and caro does everything um so i think probably the population of caros is smaller than the population of lbj's because the people who have that skill set probably have ambitions other than writing a canonical book about one particular person or you know writing two canonical books two canonical works on um two important people but maybe a lot of those people are just doing thingsDwarkesh Patel 0:39:03other than typing man there's so many threads there that i i'm like tempted to just spend the rest of the episode just digesting um and talking about that but one thing that i like there's so many interesting things about caro's story uh and i guess the impact is that one of them is there's been this focus in terms of thinking about impact especially in like circles like effective altruism of trying to crunch the numbers and there's no reasonable crunching into the numbers you could have come up with before the power broker is written where you say i'm going to spend by the way this is he tries to downplay his accomplishments as a journalist before he wrote the power broker but he was nominated for the pulitzer prize for his journalism before the power broker so he's like a top level uh investigative journalist and then you say here's i'm going to spend my talents i'm going to spend eight years looking into and researching every conceivable person who has even potentially been in the same room as or been impacted by robert moses and i'm going to document all this i'm going to write a book where that's like million words or something and but in fact that's he probably didn't think about it this way right but what was the result he probably that book probably changed how many of the most influential people who came up through politics uh think about politics think it probably changed how urban governance is done how we think about accountability and transparency for good or ill right depending on your perspective um and just that example alone really makes me suspect the sort of number crunching way of thinking about what to do and rather just like i don't know i gotta understand how the you know from procurus perspective i gotta understand how this guy accumulated this power he doesn't and it like completely transforms uh you know how urbanByrne Hobart 0:40:41governance has been yeah you know it actually uh kind of looping back to the the parental influence thing i think part of what happened was that the more caro dug into it the more he realized this is actually a big and compelling project and there's there's this kind of fun phenomenon that you can get when you're researching something where you you you've read enough that when you read something new and you see that there's a footnote you actually know what is going to be cited in that footnote and maybe you've also read the thing about how the thing in that footnote is wrong and here's why and um you know you're picking up information a lot faster you get that that nice convexity where you can skim through the stuff you know and everything you read is new information and challenges something about what you what you previously knew and that's just a really intoxicating feeling and i can imagine that it's even more fun if you're actually digging up the primary sources so you know if you're caro you've gone through the new york times archives you've read through all of the all the external coverage of what people said about most time and then you start talking to people and you realize here are things that were we got completely wrong like we thought moses didn't want x to happen and it turns out that he kept scheming and plotting to make x happen and just wanted to pretend that it wasn't his doing um you so i think that but what happens is you you build this ongoing motivation and then you can you can make something that you just wouldn't be able to make before and i think if um if you start out saying i'm going to write a million words about how cities are run um you will probably fail but if you keep writing another 500 words a day about how robert moses operated and what he did and then you have some reflections throughout that on what that means for cities then then maybe maybe you actually get there and yeah so um and and maybe some of this is like you you want to have an adversary like a lot of these like the carol books do seem partly to be this cross-examination of of who he's writing about and often he he seems to have very mixed feelings like he you know with um i think one of the one of the really interesting things in um in the years of lyndon johnson is the carol's description of um coke stevenson and how they contrast him with lbj because it's really clear that uh carol's politics are completely opposed to stevenson's and that when carol's writing about lbj there's like the good stuff he did which is the great society and his his participation in the new zealand and there's a bad stuff which is anything that wasn't bad and um so he clearly like he likes what lbj accomplished and despises the person and then really likes the person of coke stevenson and kind of wishes him well but also doesn't actually want people like that to be in charge of anything and so it's like a you know it's partly partly carol debating with his subject and interrogating his subject and partly debating with himself and asking these very long-standing questions about whether or not justify the ends and you know would it be worth it to not have a great society in exchange for not letting lbj steal an election in 1948 and i don't think that like if he's good at his writing he shouldn't be coming to firm conclusions on that and he should be presenting this very very mixed picture where you really only get the things you really want if you also accept that there are some very bad things that come along with that as long as as long as the things you want come from powerful ambitious people who will do anything to win hey guysDwarkesh Patel 0:44:14i hope you're enjoying the conversation so far if you are i would really really appreciate it if you could share the episode with other people who you think might like it this is still a pretty small podcast so it's basically impossible for me to exaggerate how much it helps out when one of you shares the podcast you know put the episode and the group chat you have with your friends post it on twitter send it to somebody who you think might like it all of those things helps out a ton anyways back to the conversation yep yep no and it's worth remembering that it takes him a decade to write each of those volumes and each of that i guess in the case of the power broker or that entire book but in the course of a decade just imagine how many times you would change your mind on a given subject and you really notice this when you read different paragraphs of like for example the power broker where you notice um early on if you just read the first third or the first half the power broker you're like clearly caro is like writing about uh uh robert moses the way he writes about robert linden johnson where it's like yeah this guy had some flaws but like look at the cool s**t he did and the awesome stuff he did for new york um and then the tone completely changes but you gotta remember it's he's just writing this so many years and uh in between i do want to uh talk about the thing about you know young people being able to you know young people i guess a war being a catalyst for young people entering an arena i did an interview of um alexander mikorovitsky i forgot his last name but anyways he wrote a really interesting book about the polyonic wars and this is actually one of the things we talked about um there's a line from war and peace where one of the russian aristocrats is mad that his son is joining uh is joining the war and he goes you know it's is that man napoleon you you've all seen him and now you all want to like go off to war and i'm curious um like filmmaking doesn't seem like we're super quantitative and super smart and super competent like somebody who has thymus and the desire to dominate and the desire to achieve recognition uh i mean do you really think he's making films like where where is he really i mean is he like still trying to start a startup or is that like now a decade too old and now he's trying to dominate some other arena i mean maybe the lame answer is we don'tByrne Hobart 0:46:31actually know because um the way like you know paul graham has that essay about the trope of startups starting in garages and i think it's called the power of the marginal and it's all about how the the really interesting projects are the ones that can barely get off the ground because they're so weird and so out there that there is no infrastructure to support them and what that ends up doing is selecting for people who are extremely passionate about that project and also people who are extremely willful and will get impossible things done so you it's hard to just rattle off a bunch of examples of that because you your hit rate would be like 99 things out of 100 are just like things you read one fun blog post speculating about and they're actually never going to happen and then you know one of them maybe maybe you're right but it's very hard to tell which one it is and you know if it were very easy venture capital would not have such such skewed returns so yeah so maybe maybe it is like harder to harder to optimize for what area do you look for maybe it's actually easier to do the meta optimization of identifying the things you would quit you know quit podcasting and go work on given the opportunity and you know it's like good to have that sort of dread list like I I had that mental list of like you know if someone at Spotify ping me and they're like we really need a product manager who can help us display classical music such that we don't list like tons of redundant information and the first 50 characters of the track name and the actual incremental useful information in the 10 characters you have to wait for it to scroll through unless it doesn't actually scroll through like if someone pinged me it was like we really need someone to fix that can you come and do this I'd be sorely tempted feel the same way about Google Finance like if if if someone emails me and says you have a mandate to make Google Finance good I'd be tempted but I think thinking of like what industries would have that kind of pull for you and then what can you do to really dig into those industries you probably find the the the proto successful people in spaces like that versus trying to optimize in advance for well if I were you know if I were someone who thinks like nobody else thinks and we're a true natural contrarian and also had spent several years learning about different opportunities which one would I have ended up picking because then you're sort of magicking away all of the things that actually make the person you're looking for it's looking for so yeah can't quite be done that way yeah yeah yeah I want to go backDwarkesh Patel 0:49:05to that thing you said a moment ago about how you couldn't have written a million words that were as impactful about just you know how cities work but if you just wrote 500 words at a time about how Robert Moses accumulated power did the things he did you can actually have a really interesting and influential piece of work is that how you see the diff that you can't write one million words at a time about where where technology is going what's happening with the productivity slowdown what's happening with all these emerging industries but if you just write 2,000 words a day about what's happening with any particular you know company or industry then you can compile this really interesting overall worldview aboutByrne Hobart 0:49:44finance and tech that's the hope and I might be projecting things about my own attention span on to on to Cairo when I say that you can't just set out to do a million words on topic X and then do it but I do think you know I hope that I am by increments producing something that is a lot more than the sum of a bunch of business profiles and a bunch of you know strategy breakdown things like that like and that's that's one of the reasons that I spent time on things like reading Machiavelli and thinking about how Machiavelli's thoughts not just not just the the totally cynical amoral stuff but the other stuff you wrote at the same time which he may have met more seriously about how to build a sustainable and good republic rather than how to be a completely amoral monarch I try to read that kind of thing because I do think that it's valuable to have that more rounded view of the human condition and and I think that it contributes a lot to to writing about these individual companies like you know technology changes a lot humans change very slowly so if you if you want to understand technology you do have to study that this specific object level case of what is this thing what does it do differently what is it a substitute for what are the compliments to it etc but if you're trying to understand things like why did this company do X like why why did they fire fire this person and not that person and why did they choose to acquire this other business why is the CEO dumping tons of money into this thing that seems like it's it doesn't make much sense well you can find lots of historical examples of people in power making these decisions that just get continuously worse and continuously more costly and they refuse to back down sometimes they turn to be right sometimes they turn to be very very wrong but you'll find more examples of that if you go back further in history and they're often just a lot more fun to read about whereas like you know if you you can read about things like board spending too much money on the pencil and it not working out or IBM investing a ton in the 360 and that working out very nicely but you know you can also go back to the Iliad and read another case where sunk cost fallacy dominated rational strictly rational decision making and you know only divine intervention could ultimately lead to a good outcome for for the attacker and even then maybe not suchDwarkesh Patel 0:52:04great outcome often considered the that particular question about where trying to predict if somebody is overstepping or if they're making the best bet of their life is something that I've been trying to think about and I really have no reasonable method for I mean if you think about like what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter is this like Napoleon trying to conquer Russia and it's this super ego filled and pride filled you know completely illogical bet from somebody who has just had like 20 consecutive wins in a row and he thinks he's invincible or is it like Elon Musk like 20 years ago where he's like yeah I did PayPal and now let's you know let's build some rockets and let's build some electric vehicles yeah exactly and in each of these cases there's there's like so many analogies to like complete bust and there's so many analogies to oh this is just like part one of this grand plan and how do you figure out what which one is happening like how do you distinguish the visionary from the collapsing you know star the cynical answer is you wait about 200 years and thenByrne Hobart 0:53:18you write about how it was obvious all along like yeah you you really don't and I mean even there are a lot of cases that are actually still ambiguous so like Alexander you know conquered most of the known world at least most of the world that that people knew of around where he grew up and and then just goes to Babylon and drinks himself to death and that's the end right you know there there could have been an alternate story where he gets his life together a little bit and runs a giant sprawling empire on the other hand like reading the story battle to battle a lot of it it actually is basically this Ponzi scheme where every time he conquers a city he gets enough enough to pay off the people he hired to help him conquer the city and then has to move to the next city because they want to get paid again and so he's sort of you know was sort of being chased by his his obligations the entire way through until he finally got got just ahead of them enough to get a lot of loot and and a lot of land that could give people instead of just giving money so giving them like bars of silver and things so so yeah even even that story it's very hard to say you know he he rolled the dice a bunch of times and he won every time so clearly he was just one of those people who's born to win maybe it was sort of like he actually backed himself into a bunch of corners over and over and over again and then desperately fought his way out every single time and then was just completely sick of it and burnt out by the time he was in his early 30s in terms of how you would figure it out in advance like I think some of it does come down to getting a sense of whether they're responding to circumstances or whether they actually have have a long-term plan but then lots of like you know there's probably nothing more dangerous than a long-term plan that someone actually has the means to execute you know five-year plan does not have a good connotation Stalin had some of those and didn't turn out well for for a lot of people so even within that there's there's some difficulty in evaluating like I think there's kind of that that meta-cynical layer where if they don't know what they're doing then probably it's dumb luck they keep succeeding on the other hand if they do know what they're doing then maybe you hope that the world is lucky enough that they get unlucky and can't actually pull off whatever it is that they're they're planning to do maybe I guess another thing would be is there is there like an end state that they can get to because I think you know someone like Alexander he basically just kept going until he couldn't go any farther until his troops were basically on the point of mutiny and then just turned around and went not all the way home but went to like the nicest place halfway home and hung out there and partied but you know if if the story if you look at someone if the story is less about conquest and more about reconquest and restoration of something then there are these natural limits you can say like you go this far and you don't go any farther because you've actually finished your task so something like you know I think like I don't actually know who was who what which generals were on the other side of Napoleon but the ones who chased him out of Russia like for them the master plan was not we're going to conquer all of Europe the master plan was like we're getting our country back and then we're going to chase him far enough that he doesn't feel like he can just wait a year and do this again when it's not winter so so maybe that's that's another way to constrain it but then then you end up naturally selecting for less ambitious people it's like one way to one way to have these guardrails on your behavior is just don't have very big ambitions so you might and in that case those people are also stuck responding to circumstances so so maybe maybe you just end up with many different iterations of the same thing on different scales where everyone is stuck in certain historical circumstances they have they have their skills they have their opportunities they can they can go after some things maybe they achieve great things maybe they fail but either way eventually their luck runs out or they run out of ideas and then there's nothing to do except go home or just keep trying to keep keep being bolder until you eventually fail on most particularly I I don't really I don't really understand it I think there's like a remote possibility that he actually has a bunch of specific concrete ideas for how to increase Twitter's free cash flow and how to pay down the debt and make it a more profitable company maybe he just had that sense that it was overstaffed and that it should survive with a smaller headcount and if you cut headcount enough then you you end up with with a profitable business it could also just have been fun and seems fun so far and I think like that you know the the pursuit of fun is is not to be discounted like you if you're super rich you can afford to do all sorts of things varying levels of entertainment but it may be that the only thing that is actually like truly novel thrill seeking fun opportunity is something like buy Twitter and then turn it into you know what it is and it is like there's I think Rostad that at this this point about how the nature of Twitter's legitimacy has changed and that now it is a it is under the rule of a single monarch instead of ruled by these sort of faceless bureaucracies so now you know if something if Twitter does something you don't like there's actually a specific person you can blame and because you have Twitter you can actually yell at that person and potentially get an answer whereas if Twitter bans you because you made a joke and the joke looked like it was serious there's really there's no recourse and you know there's there's nothing lower status than someone like arguing with someone in authority about how serious or they should take your jokes there's like you know it's like a weird component of and it works both ways so like there's I think I started noticing this years ago because there are these underscore TXT Twitter accounts where they're just posting out of context comments from some niche community and the comments always sound deranged in a lot of cases to me the comments read as someone who is doing a bit they're playing a role they know it's funny they're exaggerating for their friends and then you take it out of context and read it as totally seriously and then you get to say these people are all like this they're all crazy but it is like it is a marker of high status to be able to not get jokes and to you know be able to be like righteously angry at someone because they made a joke and if they've been serious that would have been an appalling thing to say but they obviously weren't if you if you can get away with saying no I actually don't think it was a joke at all these people are humorless and they must have been totally serious then that's that's actually you know that's cool that's high status makes you impressive but yeah must like must must rule as this more you know personal monarch I think it's a it speaks to this question of legitimacy like why do people trust moderation and why do they trust sites to operate in the way that they do and you can either say these are like really high quality institutions so you know

Perhaps the most interesting episode so far.Byrne Hobart writes at thediff.co, analyzing inflections in finance and tech.He explains:* What happened at FTX* How drugs have induced past financial bubbles* How to be long AI while hedging Taiwan invasion* Whether Musk's Twitter takeover will succeed* Where to find the next Napoleon and LBJ* & ultimately how society can deal with those who seek domination and recognitionWatch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.If you enjoy this episode, I would be super grateful if you shared it. Post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group chats, and throw it up wherever else people might find it. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.A huge thanks to Graham Bessellieu for editing this podcast.Timestamps: (0:00:50) - What the hell happened at FTX?(0:07:03) - How SBF Faked Being a Genius:  (0:12:23) - Drugs Explain Financial Bubbles (0:17:12) - On Founder Physiognomy (0:21:02) - Indexing Parental Involvement in Raising Talented Kids (0:30:35) - Where are all the Caro-level Biographers? (0:39:03) - Where are today's Great Founders?  (0:49:05) - Micro Writing -> Macro Understanding (0:52:04) - Elon's Twitter Takeover (1:01:28) - Does Big Tech & West Have Great People? (1:12:10) - Philosophical Fanatics and Effective Altruism  (1:17:54) - What Great Founders Have In Common (1:20:24) - Thinkers vs. Analyzers (1:26:17) - Taiwan Invasion bets & AI Timelines TranscriptAutogenerated - will not be perfectly accurate.Dwarkesh Patel 0:00:00Okay, today I have the pleasure of interviewing Bern Hobart again for the second time now, who writes at thediff.co. The way I would describe Bern is every time I have a question about a concept or an event in finance, I Google the name of that event or concept into Google, and then I'd put in Bern Hobart at the end of that search query. And nine times out of 10, it's the best thing I've read about that topic. And it's just so interesting. It's just like the most schizophrenic and galaxy brain it takes about like how, you know, the discourses of, you know, Machiavelli's discourses relate to big tech or like how source of serial reflexivity explains hiring in finance and tech. So just very interesting stuff. I'm glad to have him back on again.Byrne Hobart 0:00:47Yeah, great to be back. Awesome.Dwarkesh Patel 0:00:50Okay. So first, I really want to jump into the FTX saga. What the hell happened? Let me just like leave an open ended question for you.Byrne Hobart 0:00:59Yeah, so I think the first thing to say is that there's a lot we don't know. There's a lot we may never know, because so many of the decisions at FTX were made through self like auto deleting encrypted chat. So like there are some holes we will never be able to fill in. The lack of accounting is also going to make it tough. Like basically, I think you can tell a bunch of different stories here. The really obvious one is fraud. And you can debate over exactly when it started, like one version of the story, which is getting some currency is that SPF had this entity Alameda, and it was supposed to be this really hot crypto trading fund, but maybe it was a Ponzi scheme all along. And then maybe at some point that Ponzi scheme started to run short on cash. So he decided to start an exchange and the exchange got more cash, and then he used the cash to pay off previous bachelors, whatever. I think that's one version. And then kind of the maximally exculpatory version, which actually is still really bad is Alameda was a real company. They really made money trading. They took tons of risks. And SPF has talked about why he thinks that's a good thing, that FTX cut some corners when they were raising money and that they had really bad internal accounting. And that basically the extended entity of Alameda and FTX sort of lost track of whose money was where and it ended up with Alameda spending FTX customer money, which I think is like, one way to look at that is like, if you think, okay, fraud is like twice as bad as just incompetently losing money. Well, it's not as if we had a $4 billion fraud instead of $8 billion fraud, everyone would be like, well, that's fine. That's normal. Like, why are you giving sky high time? It's bad no matter what. Running a big company that is systemically important in crypto and then having that company completely vaporize over the course of a couple of days, really, really bad and worth understanding what happened. But it's partly worth understanding what happened because there are just different solutions that present themselves depending on what you think the story is. Like if the story is fraud, it's actually a lot harder to solve because there are just a lot of people who are willing and able to commit fraud and to lie. If the story is bad accounting, then that's actually a lot more solvable because then you could say things like, the solution is make sure you never invest in a crypto exchange that doesn't have a real auditor and make sure that they have their proof of reserves calculation and it's happening consistently and that you can audit that. There are different solution sets. And then I think the actual story is going to be somewhere in the middle of extreme risk tolerance plus extremely poor accounting plus fraud at some point. But I suspect the fraud actually happened pretty late. If it happened, which I think there's like 80, 90% chance that there was some level of fraud versus pure incompetence. But if so, I think may have happened fairly late in the story and as kind of a last desperate move. I think part of what drives the response to what happened with FTX and Alameda is that if you think the story is pure fraud, it's very easy to say you would never do that. I can say very easily, I would definitely never start a Ponzi scheme and then start another bigger Ponzi scheme to pay off the first Ponzi scheme. That's not me. That's not most people. But I think if you draw the scenario where they discover at some point like a couple months ago or even a month ago, they realized, hey, we actually there's a billion dollars plus that was supposed to be customer money, but we thought it was Alameda money and we actually spent it and now it's gone. We've lost it. What would you do in that circumstance? And I think the ideal answer is, well, I'd immediately come clean and step down and commit myself to getting everyone paid back and made whole. And I think there's also the possibility that the realistic answer is more like, well, I would scramble and try to make sure that that didn't cause the company to collapse and try to pick up later. And so at that point, you've sort of backed your way into fraud through earlier episodes of incompetence. But I think like one of the problems with the fraud story is frauds have to be good at accounting because they have to like, you know, there's very rough schematic sense. They have to be twice as good at accounting as everybody else, because not only do they have to have the real books that tell them how much money the business has and whether or not the next check they're at will bounce, but they have to have the fake set of books and they have to have a way to make those tie out with one another. So they actually like frauds, accounting frauds tend to be fairly sophisticated. They tend to really dive into edge cases. I was reading up on MF Global, which was a big futures brokerage that collapsed in part because they were dipping into customer funds and making some investments they shouldn't have. And they did a lot of clever and shady stuff. Like one of the things they would do is there was one point where they were transferring money at the last minute out of their consumer, out of their customer funds in order to make margin calls. And what they would do is they would send the wire from the customer account to a different company account. And they'd send it a couple of minutes before the wires closed for the night. And then they would send this email right after the wires closed saying, Hey, we just realized we set this transfer fraud account got to reverse tomorrow. So that gave them at least one night of enough liquidity to survive. Now, you can only do that kind of fraud if you are actually keeping really close track of where your money is, where it's supposed to be, what the rules are, so that you know exactly how to break those rules. I don't think FDX was in any position to commit that kind of fraud. I think that if they tried to do something like that, like they wire the money from an account that didn't have any money in it or something or send it to the wrong account. There are these stories about them accidentally burning a bunch of USDC by sending it to an address that didn't exist or something like that. The operational slip ups actually make it harder for them to have committed fraud. And it's unquestionable at this point that their record keeping was very bad.Dwarkesh Patel 0:07:03Yeah, to your point about the fraud being harder. I mean, it's like a classic story about if you just tell the truth, it's just gonna be much easier for you. You just don't have to keep track with that many things. But the one thing I've been thinking about, I interviewed him for like an hour. And before that, I tried to do quite a bit of research into how FDX worked and what was going on. And I had this impression that this guy was like the most competent genius that had ever graced finance. And this was like a common impression. This wasn't just... And then, but it turns out that, you know, they were like, it just like out of sheer incompetency loses track of billions of dollars, the internal operations, it just like him putting together spreadsheets and throwing them around and putting emojis on slack messages, asking for payments. And I just like, I want to understand how it is that this guy put out the impression out there that he is just hyper competent. And it turns out that it's like the opposite. It's not even that he's mediocre. It's the opposite.Byrne Hobart 0:08:09Right. Yeah. So I think you can tell a couple stories there, like one story. And I know I've been saying a lot, like you can tell multiple stories. There are multiple stories that fit the facts. We have lots of different weird things to explain and therefore many different weird explanations that fit them. So I think one version is, okay, he's never all that smart and decided that he could just play up this weird, you know, eccentric genius thing. And that would be able to get away with it. And there are these anecdotes about how someone told him to cut his hair and he said, no, I have to look kind of crazy for this. And so that fits in. And it is kind of an MIT thing to do that, to play up your eccentricity because you know there are these super brilliant, very eccentric people and you can be like them. It's kind of like, a lot of people, they read about Steve Jobs and they're like, well, the secret to success is be this brilliant perfectionist who can always see the future and also be just a giant a*****e to everyone you meet. And I'm going to try to do both of those things. And it turns out one of those is really, really easy to do. And then one of them is really, really hard and you have to do both to be Steve Jobs. But you can sort of give this surface level impression of Jobsy and this by just being really obnoxious to everyone. So I think some of it is that. But the other is that if you get really good at just very narrow domain specific stuff, you might miss what other stuff people have to be good at for that skill set to be valuable. And so I think thinking about his previous background where he worked at a prop trading firm and seemed to do well there. It's Jane Street. They're very, very selective with who they hire, very hard to get in and they're very profitable. So good to get in. It's entirely possible that part of what happened was just that Jane Street has its operations people, they have their trading people. And it may there may have been enough siloing within that, that if your job is just identify discrepancies in ETF prices and take advantage of them, you don't actually have to know things like how do we figure out which counterparties are credit worthy? How do we make sure we have enough liquidity? How do we have backup plans upon backup plans upon backup plans in case something goes wrong with our liquidity situation? Because part of the Jane Street model seems to be there. They're very, very opaque, but like very opaque in terms of their trading operations. But part of the model seems to be that they want to be the trader who is there and trading and making a market when everything fell apart. And what that means is that like the way you make the most money in trading is when markets are insanely volatile, volume is very, very high, and you're still trading. But the reason that markets get really volatile when prices collapse and there's a lot of trade going on is that other people who would love to be trading can't trade because maybe the broker they use is suddenly insolvent and they can't get to a new broker, their money is frozen. So if you're planning to be there when everybody else is out of the market, then you have to have lots and lots of contingency plans. And it's not enough to buy lots of deep out of the money put options as Jane Street does. You also have to make sure that you're buying those options from counterparty who will actually send you the money when you need it or that you want to structure those things so the actual cash gets to your account at the time that needs to be there. And that maybe is something that a prop trader should not be spending most of their time thinking about. Like, it's one of those things where it's like, if you own a house and you like if over the last 24 hours, you learned a whole lot about electrical wiring, or you learned a whole lot about how plumbing works or how septic tanks work, like, that's not good. That means something very, very bad happened in your house. And it could be nice to be an expert on those things. But if you suddenly became an expert, it's because somebody else wasn't doing their job. So I think you could you could be a trader like that where they can be very good at the finding little pricing discrepancies thing and have just no awareness of what the operation stuff is, especially because the better the operations team is, the less anyone else needs to be aware of them. Like they like you only email them when something is going wrong. So if nothing is going wrong, you never email them and then you forget they exist.Dwarkesh Patel 0:12:23Yeah, yeah, no, that's a good point. In fact, in the interview I did of him, he mentioned that I asked him what is the difference between Jane Street and FTX. And he mentioned that at Jane Street, there was like this button he could press to like buy. And all that's all the intermediaries, all the servers, it was just taken care of. And what was really funny is then he said, and just getting a bank account and he goes, and let's talk about that. Just getting a bank account is so hard when you're in an infinite. It apparently turns out it's so hard that you might have like commingled funds because you couldn't manage to separate them out. Yeah, no, that's crazy. You had this really interesting take. I think one point we were talking about how every single market crash can be explained by the drug that was common in the industry at the time. And we finally achieved like the hypergrade meth stage of I forgot the name of like that patch you was taking, but it's like stronger than Adderall or whatever.Byrne Hobart 0:13:23So it was, I think it's saying every crash can be explained by the drug they're taking at the time. That takes a little, but I do think that the impact of drugs, of new drugs on financial markets is underrated. And you can have examples of this going back pretty far. Like there is some connection between caffeine consumption and like extroversion and risk taking like you temporarily get a little bit more willing to do deals when you consume caffeine and in Lloyd's of London before it was this insurance consortium, it was a coffee shop. It was Lloyd's coffee shop. So you do have some history of coffee shops being associated with financial centers. And then you have to zoom forward because we just haven't had that many novel stimulants, I guess depressants, deliriums, whatever, like other drug categories probably just don't lead to that much financial activity. Like I don't know how someone would trade differently or invest differently if they had a really strong acid trip or took ecstasy or something. But the stimulants where people can just consistently reuse them, they keep people alert, they make them active and wanting to do things. It seems like stimulants would have a connection to financial markets. So yeah, that theory is like if you look at the 1980s where there were a lot of these hostile takeover deals where someone would find a company that's underperforming and when you look at the spreadsheets and say this company is underperforming, what you're often looking at is a story that is more like this company believes that they have this social obligation to the community where people work and that they have an obligation to give their customers a fairly priced product and maybe they give them really good customer service that doesn't really pay for itself and it's the right thing to do. Well maybe especially if you are a coke head with kind of coke head morality, you decide well that's not the right thing to do at all. You should actually just take the money and we should fire these people and replace them with cheaper employees. So you know levering up a company and then like levering up in order to buy out a bigger company and then firing everyone and you know shutting down the pension plan and distributing the surplus to shareholders like it is just very standard coke head behavior. Whereas if you look at the mortgage backed securities boom and structured products generally in the mid-2000s, the way that people made money in that was just by being very very detail oriented and being able to make these incredibly fine grained distinctions between different products that were basically similar but one of them pays 5.7% and one of them pays 5.75% and if you lever up that difference enough times you're actually making really good money consistently. It's super boring but maybe with enough Adderall it's actually very tolerable work that you can enjoy. So I do think that just like within stimulants the difference between short acting stimulants and long acting stimulants does mean the difference between a hostile takeover boom and a structured products boom. And then yeah there's I think the drug is called M-sem or something which is like a Parkinson's treatment and there's some evidence from pretty small sample size studies that one of the side effects of this drug is compulsive gambling. So yeah and the drug story there have been very very fun tweets about this claim and then there have been these official denials from the company doctor on the other hand if you're a company that has a company doctor maybe that says something about the level of medication you're consuming and maybe the company doctor's job is partly to say as a doctor I can assure you I would never give someone three times the normal dose of Adderall just because their boss hired me to do that specifically. I think dealers don't exactly have patient confidentiality norms, doctors do so maybe you hire a doctor instead of a dealer specifically to get that plausible deniability.Dwarkesh Patel 0:17:12Other than drugs I also want to ask you about the phenotype of the founder. You wrote a post I think it was like just a couple of weeks before this crash happened where you were pointing out that this idea of a founder who comes in shorts and a t-shirt and a crazy haircut. By the way so FTX had a barber who would come in every Tuesday to cut everybody's hair it might have been Thursday and that so he could have just like sat in line and gotten his haircut like that was that was completely unnecessary the way he dressed and it was like very purposeful. But yeah so if that archetype of a founder who's in a t-shirt and shorts if that's been priced in and that's beta instead of alpha now what is the new phenotype and physiognomy of the founder? Where are you looking for alpha?Byrne Hobart 0:17:58Well I guess I would draw the distinction between like the physical type of someone versus their presentation and their dress. Yeah I don't know I'm sure someone could run some interesting numbers on that but I don't have a good sense of what exactly they'd get from that but in terms of you know how people public people publicly present that present themselves my guess is that yeah there will be this swing towards investing in people who look a little bit more formal a little bit more boring and these things are somewhat cyclical. Like I think part of you know part of the norm on investing in or you know treating basically treating the suit as a negative signal is that a lot of investors have this view that when the MBAs come into an industry a lot of the alpha is gone and it is true that MBAs at least you know there's it's like a decent market timing signal apparently that if a lot of people from Harvard Business School go straight into some field that field is probably peaking. So there's a little bit to that where the suit is some example of conformity on the other hand wearing a suit in Silicon Valley is an example of non-conformity and I guess outside of outside of New York within the US most of the time wearing a suit as a tech company founder would be this weird sign that you know you're either like you don't know what you're doing you don't know what the right signals are or you know you're about to testify to Congress and that's why you have a suit now. You're not not generally a great sign but maybe it is a sign that you are willing to do some more conformist things and that you could pay attention to details the details are boring and also that you are putting some you're making some kind of financial investment in in that particular appearance. So yeah I would I would guess that there is there will be a tilt away from the hyper informal founders but I also think that if you treat that hyper informality as either this attempt to gain the system and just say like I'm going to be as much I'm going to try to remind people of Mark Zuckerberg circa 2005 as much as possible so I can raise money and pretend to be the next big thing that is that's one thing people are signaling and then the other thing is they're just accidentally signaling total indifference to anything except the thing they're working on and maybe that's a good thing but maybe maybe it's a good thing in unregulated domains and then a really really bad thing in regulated domains like if you're investing in a medical devices company you you probably don't want a founder who just cannot focus on anything except the product because there are rules they have to follow and you know norms and things and yeah it gets bad if all they're focused on is this one element you know if the hyper focus is like just right perfectly calibrated that's good but then maybe maybe adjusting your appearances this way to say that you have correctly calibrated your hyper focus and you're going to get one thing right and it's going to be really really right like you're going to get things right they're going to be really really right and you've identified what things matter what things don't.Dwarkesh Patel 0:21:02Yeah you'll lose track of your bank accounts. That's the dress itself but I also want to ask about the other characteristics you had this really interesting point in that blog post about how you know when you try to scout for talent when the talent is young you're over indexing for parental involvement and I'm curious if you had to identify somebody who had to be under the age of 18 or under the age of 20 what is the metric you're looking at that least indexes for parental involvement where they're being forced or encouraged by their parents to do it?Byrne Hobart 0:21:35I think the closest you could get is something that is either totally illegible to the parent's status like understanding of status or something that is actively low status and it's hard to hard to enumerate those and not just get swamped in well should this thing be low status the high status is actually terrible to say that you ever want to hire someone who was really good at x for some value of x but I do think that you so basically the origin of that point was that I was arguing that when you if you look at people who are at some percentile and they're in their 20s or 30s like a lot of like at a high percentile like a lot of it has to be that they have some combination of talent and have tried really hard there's probably been some element of luck but over time the luck starts to starts to wash out hopefully but the younger you go and this is probably just my experience of having kids like if you talk to your kids every day about multiplication they will start doing multiplication at a pretty early age and it's not that they are you know really really smart and they got to multiplication a couple years early it's that you push them in that direction and they were able to do it early so like the earlier you go the more you are over indexing on what the parents did what they emphasized and also what they told the kids was just part of the script and there are anecdotes about this from none of the specifics coming to mind but I remember anecdotes about people who grew up in lower middle class or below circumstances but would have one distant relative who owned a business and that made them aware that they could own a business and this is like a thing they could do it's part of the script now and that wasn't the only reason that they would have started business but it could be a reason that they decided to do that when they did and you have to imagine that for everyone who had one uncle who owned a scrap dealer or something that maybe there are five or ten or fifty people who grew up in similar circumstances had a similar level of innate ability and just didn't have anyone in their social circle who demonstrated to them that this was something you could actually do so I think like getting getting back to the talent identification problem but part of my thesis there was that it's it's really hard and it's getting harder that you had Y Combinator going after the relatively young talent versus what the medium BC was going after when YC started and then stuff like Pioneer and Emergent Ventures is going even younger and the younger you get the more it is this luck driven thing that is about what they got exposed to with the exception of prodigies so I'd like to think that if I encountered an eight-year-old Mozart I would be able to identify this person as just an extraordinary talent where like even if their parents were making them practice ten hours a day they couldn't be that good without talent and maybe something similar with the Polar Sisters where okay if I you know encounter a six-year-old who can routinely beat me at chess and so I go Google some you know read some chess books and then go back and try to beat them again and they're actually better and they're laughing at me and things like at some point you decide that this is actually natural talent but there's for a lot of other domains there's just so much room for parents to push one thing and do some combination of their kids talent and their own emphasis to get their kids really good at it and that's very hard to adjust for especially because if you ask the parents they're going to underestimate how much they overemphasize things because to them this is just a normal thing that everyone should be interested in and so you won't you won't get a good signal from asking parents and then you won't get a good signal from asking other people because they don't know how this family spends time at home and you know if if the medium family has more more YouTube and Netflix time and less you know less math practice time that family's just going to assume it's pretty pretty much their behavior is normal.Dwarkesh Patel 0:25:25It's a bit confusing because you also want to potentially include parental involvement in your estimate of how good this person will end up being if you think for example that giving somebody a shot to get started programming early is actually a big factor in putting them on that sort of like loop where they get better by practicing and they enjoy it more so on you might expect momentum more than mean reversion in that kind of like early start.Byrne Hobart 0:25:54Sure so I think part of part of what this gets to is the question of what are you optimizing for when you're doing a talent search and I think this is maybe one reason there could be some alpha left in talent search among people who are super young is that a lot of the academic institutions that are doing some form of talent search what they're pretty much optimizing for is how does this person do over the next year so you know if someone is a math prodigy and they get to join the math team at that school the school is not trying to optimize for will this person be proving novel theorems when they're 25 it's really will this seven-year-old be doing you know algebra by the time they're eight and that's that is still very tied to parental involvement especially once you know parents like kids they like structure and if you tell them this is the appropriate next thing to do with your kid then they're more likely to do it so you can post on that momentum for a while but what I think you the trap you can run into is that you identify people who are like 95th percentile talent with 99th percentile just super aggressive parents and that combination gets them to 99th percentile performance until they leave home and then they never do whatever that thing is ever again because they didn't really like it it was just something their parents pressured them into now maybe the ideal would be you get 99 percentile on both so the parents are putting them on this trajectory but the parents are actually aiming you know a very powerful rocket ship and it's going to go right in the right direction which is ideal and I think there's a there's a reasonable possibility that like I think there are there's like some level of just imprinting that young kids have where a lot of kids learn about programming when they're very young and that's something that they do from a very very early age and then it becomes the thing that they work on for their entire career obviously that has to be fairly new because it's not like they're you know from like anyone who was born before 1970 just had this constant yearning to program computers and could never satisfy it like those kids found something else to do maybe a generation before it was repairing transistor radios like mine did when he was a kid and maybe a century before that it was experimenting by building little internal combustion engines and seeing whether or not they explode like Henry Ford did with his friends at school and maybe before that like the earlier you got the harder it gets to really map these activities to anything concrete that we understand and can relate to but there's there's probably some extent to which you can you can sort of direct kids into whatever the modern instantiation of this long-term enduring tendency is and I guess one so one interesting example of that I've been reading the Robert Caro LBJ biography and there's this bit towards the end of the first volume where LBJ is put in charge of this fundraising organization for Democrats in Congress and when you read about it he sounds like a traitor he sounds like someone who was just born to be slinging currency derivatives or something because he is constantly on the phone constantly picking up rumors constantly sending money here and there and everywhere else and he's like always sending money overnight and then sending someone a telegram the day before saying you're going to get a package from Lyndon Baines Johnson and you're welcome so he's like he's doing this thing where he's constantly relentlessly optimizing every little tiny detail of some very complicated process clearly requires enormous working memory requires a very strong basically a very strong poker face like he has to be able to differentiate between someone who is begging for money because they are at they're pulling at 49% and with a little bit more money for newspaper ads they get to 50.1% versus someone who just wants the money or just is constantly freaking out by their nature so it requires a lot of the same character traits but 1930s were just not a great time to go to Wall Street maybe if LBJ had been born at a slightly different time that's that's just what he would have done and it would have been a very successful private equity executive or something but sometimes those these general skills they can translate into a lot of different areas and they get honed into very specific skills through through deliberate practice in those areas so if you have that combination of natural tendency and some level of motivation which in LBJ's case his dad was also a politician so he had this example of this is part of the life script you can't do it but he also had the example of his dad was broke after a while and so he he had this example of what not to do and ended up making good money for himself in addition to his political career yeah yeahDwarkesh Patel 0:30:35I'm glad you brought up the biography I'm reading it right now as well and the other biography by Robert Caro the power broker just for the audience the last episode or the second to last episode in the feed is we go deep into deep into that biography and talk about why it might be inaccurate in certain respects but what is what it is accurate and I think what Caro has a genius in is talking about the personalities of these great great men about the people who have really shaped their cities or their countries for decades and centuries there's many places where I mean I'm sure this is true for you if you understand like the economics of an issue he's talking about there's a lot to be left to care his explanation but the actual like the sort of breakdown of the personalities is just so fascinating and worth a reading care for but you know come to think of it so maybe the difference between the cases where you want to price in the parents involvement and the ones where you don't is where in situations like maybe being a politician where it really is about building a network building know-how building this sort of inarticulable knowledge from an early age it might be the case that in those situations just having connections and having parental involvement gets you far but if it's like becoming a programmer sure you'll like have done data structures by the time you're 16 but eventually you'll get to the point where you know everybody knows the basics and now you actually how to do interesting and cool things in computer science and now you're like a 95th percentile of spatial reasoning IQ is not going to get you that far but let me ask you about the care of biography because you had a really interesting comment that I've been warning you about as well in your in your review of the book or in your comment about the book you said it's worth speculating on how many lbg level figures exist today perhaps in domains outside of politics and how many caro level biographers there are who could do them justice so do you have some idea of who these figures are or if not that at least what areas you'd expect them to beByrne Hobart 0:32:34in I think a lot of people who are close to that tier and have some of the same personality types are in sales and corporate development and stuff like that where they you know they're they're building a big network they are constantly building out this giant levered balance sheet of favors you know favors out to them favors they owe to other people and like all forms of leverage it does allow you to grow a lot faster but you occasionally want these big big blowups so that's that's one place I would look I think if you try to look at the more you know pure executive founder types then it gets harder to find someone who would have exactly that kind of personality it's like part of what made lbj's methods work was that he was adjacent to a bunch of these really big institutions and he could sort of siphon off some of the power that these institutions had and in some cases could make them more powerful so I'm about a third of the way through master of the senate right now so it's it's just getting to the point where he's really getting cooking and really making the senate more more effective than it used to be and also making it an organization where someone where it's less seniority based so you kind of you need to be attached to something much bigger than yourself for that particular skill set to work really well that said you could have a really big impact because it is it's another form of leverage so if you are one of a hundred senators or I guess at the point at that point it was 96 senators and you're you're able to exert a lot more influence and be you know be the equivalent to 40 senators for example then you can get a whole lot done because it's it's the us senate but if you have that same kind of skill set and you're the ceo of your company well you're you're already in front of the company like there's only so much extra force you can exert so you you kind of see a figure with exactly that kind of personality trait in a case where there are big institutions that have slowed down somewhat and this is another interesting point that is raised early master at the senate is that the senate was getting old and if you look at these long-term charts of average age of politicians we're we're definitely in a bull market for extremely extremely old politicians in the u.s right now but we've gone through cycles before and one of the things that that tends to cause a reset is the war where wars among other things cause this huge reset in social capital so the people who made mistakes in the early stages all get discredited and then the the social bonds that people forge from actually fighting alongside one another and the the prestige you get from actually being part of the winning side that is very hard to replicate and so you end up with much younger people in much you know in positions of a lot more power whereas the the way that that worked a decade and a half earlier was the 1930s there just weren't a lot of organizations that were hiring heavily and looking for really ambitious young people who are going to shake things up but the u.s government was so that's that's how lbj got in and started on his path was that the new deal created these big programs like the national youth administration and they needed people like johnson to to run them so when you look at um you look at an industry that is aging it's usually an industry where um ambitious people stay away from it like they recognize it's becoming more seniority focused and there's just less going on but there becomes this huge opportunity when the aging stops because a bunch of people either retire or they get discredited and have to leave and suddenly the average age of the industry ratchets down and you can basically look at the set of opportunities that were missed over the previous decade for example because um because the industry was like the whatever this institution was was too risk averse you you get to take all of those opportunities at once so you have tons and tons of low-hanging fruit when that shift happens so i think that's that's the other thing to look for is look for cases where there's some some institution some part of the economy or society that has just been slowing down for a long time clearly getting to the limit of whatever its current operating model is hasn't found a new model and there's someone young and disruptive who's just entering it so i mean maybe maybe the place to look for the next lbj is um someone doing independent films and someone who looks at the top box office results and sees that everything is a spin-off of a spin-off of a spin-off and it's you know 50 percent marvel and says this is disgusting we have to destroy it and i'm going to build something completely different like maybe that person is actually the kind of lbj archetype now the other half of this question is the caro archetype and part of what i found fun about this was that um i felt like caro had this kind of um like he was kind of disgusted with himself when he realized how similar his some of his methods were to lbj's because he's writing this story about this guy who's will do anything to make a sort of friendship but it's really a fake friendship just to accomplish his goals and he's constantly doing doing the reading that other people aren't doing and doing the work and making the calls and reiterating and reiterating iterating just endless patience and then you read about how caro works and he does things like moves to dc for a while talks to everyone in dc befriends people goes to um texas talks you know moves to the hill country and gets to know people there he has these anecdotes in the book because the book is like um it's sort of has these hints of gonzo journalism where sometimes caro will just narrate it's that he'll he will go from here's what happened in 1946 to here's what happened to me in the 70s while i was talking to this guy about what he did in 1946 and sometimes he he will basically come out and say i waited until the person who paid this bribe had alzheimer's and then i asked him if he remembered paying the bribe and he remembered that he did it and didn't remember he wasn't supposed to say it so that's how i know and um there's this line that caro keeps quoting from lbj which i think was from lbj's speech coach days or speech like debate team coach days where his line was if you do everything you will win and caro does everything um so i think probably the population of caros is smaller than the population of lbj's because the people who have that skill set probably have ambitions other than writing a canonical book about one particular person or you know writing two canonical books two canonical works on um two important people but maybe a lot of those people are just doing thingsDwarkesh Patel 0:39:03other than typing man there's so many threads there that i i'm like tempted to just spend the rest of the episode just digesting um and talking about that but one thing that i like there's so many interesting things about caro's story uh and i guess the impact is that one of them is there's been this focus in terms of thinking about impact especially in like circles like effective altruism of trying to crunch the numbers and there's no reasonable crunching into the numbers you could have come up with before the power broker is written where you say i'm going to spend by the way this is he tries to downplay his accomplishments as a journalist before he wrote the power broker but he was nominated for the pulitzer prize for his journalism before the power broker so he's like a top level uh investigative journalist and then you say here's i'm going to spend my talents i'm going to spend eight years looking into and researching every conceivable person who has even potentially been in the same room as or been impacted by robert moses and i'm going to document all this i'm going to write a book where that's like million words or something and but in fact that's he probably didn't think about it this way right but what was the result he probably that book probably changed how many of the most influential people who came up through politics uh think about politics think it probably changed how urban governance is done how we think about accountability and transparency for good or ill right depending on your perspective um and just that example alone really makes me suspect the sort of number crunching way of thinking about what to do and rather just like i don't know i gotta understand how the you know from procurus perspective i gotta understand how this guy accumulated this power he doesn't and it like completely transforms uh you know how urbanByrne Hobart 0:40:41governance has been yeah you know it actually uh kind of looping back to the the parental influence thing i think part of what happened was that the more caro dug into it the more he realized this is actually a big and compelling project and there's there's this kind of fun phenomenon that you can get when you're researching something where you you you've read enough that when you read something new and you see that there's a footnote you actually know what is going to be cited in that footnote and maybe you've also read the thing about how the thing in that footnote is wrong and here's why and um you know you're picking up information a lot faster you get that that nice convexity where you can skim through the stuff you know and everything you read is new information and challenges something about what you what you previously knew and that's just a really intoxicating feeling and i can imagine that it's even more fun if you're actually digging up the primary sources so you know if you're caro you've gone through the new york times archives you've read through all of the all the external coverage of what people said about most time and then you start talking to people and you realize here are things that were we got completely wrong like we thought moses didn't want x to happen and it turns out that he kept scheming and plotting to make x happen and just wanted to pretend that it wasn't his doing um you so i think that but what happens is you you build this ongoing motivation and then you can you can make something that you just wouldn't be able to make before and i think if um if you start out saying i'm going to write a million words about how cities are run um you will probably fail but if you keep writing another 500 words a day about how robert moses operated and what he did and then you have some reflections throughout that on what that means for cities then then maybe maybe you actually get there and yeah so um and and maybe some of this is like you you want to have an adversary like a lot of these like the carol books do seem partly to be this cross-examination of of who he's writing about and often he he seems to have very mixed feelings like he you know with um i think one of the one of the really interesting things in um in the years of lyndon johnson is the carol's description of um coke stevenson and how they contrast him with lbj because it's really clear that uh carol's politics are completely opposed to stevenson's and that when carol's writing about lbj there's like the good stuff he did which is the great society and his his participation in the new zealand and there's a bad stuff which is anything that wasn't bad and um so he clearly like he likes what lbj accomplished and despises the person and then really likes the person of coke stevenson and kind of wishes him well but also doesn't actually want people like that to be in charge of anything and so it's like a you know it's partly partly carol debating with his subject and interrogating his subject and partly debating with himself and asking these very long-standing questions about whether or not justify the ends and you know would it be worth it to not have a great society in exchange for not letting lbj steal an election in 1948 and i don't think that like if he's good at his writing he shouldn't be coming to firm conclusions on that and he should be presenting this very very mixed picture where you really only get the things you really want if you also accept that there are some very bad things that come along with that as long as as long as the things you want come from powerful ambitious people who will do anything to win hey guysDwarkesh Patel 0:44:14i hope you're enjoying the conversation so far if you are i would really really appreciate it if you could share the episode with other people who you think might like it this is still a pretty small podcast so it's basically impossible for me to exaggerate how much it helps out when one of you shares the podcast you know put the episode and the group chat you have with your friends post it on twitter send it to somebody who you think might like it all of those things helps out a ton anyways back to the conversation yep yep no and it's worth remembering that it takes him a decade to write each of those volumes and each of that i guess in the case of the power broker or that entire book but in the course of a decade just imagine how many times you would change your mind on a given subject and you really notice this when you read different paragraphs of like for example the power broker where you notice um early on if you just read the first third or the first half the power broker you're like clearly caro is like writing about uh uh robert moses the way he writes about robert linden johnson where it's like yeah this guy had some flaws but like look at the cool s**t he did and the awesome stuff he did for new york um and then the tone completely changes but you gotta remember it's he's just writing this so many years and uh in between i do want to uh talk about the thing about you know young people being able to you know young people i guess a war being a catalyst for young people entering an arena i did an interview of um alexander mikorovitsky i forgot his last name but anyways he wrote a really interesting book about the polyonic wars and this is actually one of the things we talked about um there's a line from war and peace where one of the russian aristocrats is mad that his son is joining uh is joining the war and he goes you know it's is that man napoleon you you've all seen him and now you all want to like go off to war and i'm curious um like filmmaking doesn't seem like we're super quantitative and super smart and super competent like somebody who has thymus and the desire to dominate and the desire to achieve recognition uh i mean do you really think he's making films like where where is he really i mean is he like still trying to start a startup or is that like now a decade too old and now he's trying to dominate some other arena i mean maybe the lame answer is we don'tByrne Hobart 0:46:31actually know because um the way like you know paul graham has that essay about the trope of startups starting in garages and i think it's called the power of the marginal and it's all about how the the really interesting projects are the ones that can barely get off the ground because they're so weird and so out there that there is no infrastructure to support them and what that ends up doing is selecting for people who are extremely passionate about that project and also people who are extremely willful and will get impossible things done so you it's hard to just rattle off a bunch of examples of that because you your hit rate would be like 99 things out of 100 are just like things you read one fun blog post speculating about and they're actually never going to happen and then you know one of them maybe maybe you're right but it's very hard to tell which one it is and you know if it were very easy venture capital would not have such such skewed returns so yeah so maybe maybe it is like harder to harder to optimize for what area do you look for maybe it's actually easier to do the meta optimization of identifying the things you would quit you know quit podcasting and go work on given the opportunity and you know it's like good to have that sort of dread list like I I had that mental list of like you know if someone at Spotify ping me and they're like we really need a product manager who can help us display classical music such that we don't list like tons of redundant information and the first 50 characters of the track name and the actual incremental useful information in the 10 characters you have to wait for it to scroll through unless it doesn't actually scroll through like if someone pinged me it was like we really need someone to fix that can you come and do this I'd be sorely tempted feel the same way about Google Finance like if if if someone emails me and says you have a mandate to make Google Finance good I'd be tempted but I think thinking of like what industries would have that kind of pull for you and then what can you do to really dig into those industries you probably find the the the proto successful people in spaces like that versus trying to optimize in advance for well if I were you know if I were someone who thinks like nobody else thinks and we're a true natural contrarian and also had spent several years learning about different opportunities which one would I have ended up picking because then you're sort of magicking away all of the things that actually make the person you're looking for it's looking for so yeah can't quite be done that way yeah yeah yeah I want to go backDwarkesh Patel 0:49:05to that thing you said a moment ago about how you couldn't have written a million words that were as impactful about just you know how cities work but if you just wrote 500 words at a time about how Robert Moses accumulated power did the things he did you can actually have a really interesting and influential piece of work is that how you see the diff that you can't write one million words at a time about where where technology is going what's happening with the productivity slowdown what's happening with all these emerging industries but if you just write 2,000 words a day about what's happening with any particular you know company or industry then you can compile this really interesting overall worldview aboutByrne Hobart 0:49:44finance and tech that's the hope and I might be projecting things about my own attention span on to on to Cairo when I say that you can't just set out to do a million words on topic X and then do it but I do think you know I hope that I am by increments producing something that is a lot more than the sum of a bunch of business profiles and a bunch of you know strategy breakdown things like that like and that's that's one of the reasons that I spent time on things like reading Machiavelli and thinking about how Machiavelli's thoughts not just not just the the totally cynical amoral stuff but the other stuff you wrote at the same time which he may have met more seriously about how to build a sustainable and good republic rather than how to be a completely amoral monarch I try to read that kind of thing because I do think that it's valuable to have that more rounded view of the human condition and and I think that it contributes a lot to to writing about these individual companies like you know technology changes a lot humans change very slowly so if you if you want to understand technology you do have to study that this specific object level case of what is this thing what does it do differently what is it a substitute for what are the compliments to it etc but if you're trying to understand things like why did this company do X like why why did they fire fire this person and not that person and why did they choose to acquire this other business why is the CEO dumping tons of money into this thing that seems like it's it doesn't make much sense well you can find lots of historical examples of people in power making these decisions that just get continuously worse and continuously more costly and they refuse to back down sometimes they turn to be right sometimes they turn to be very very wrong but you'll find more examples of that if you go back further in history and they're often just a lot more fun to read about whereas like you know if you you can read about things like board spending too much money on the pencil and it not working out or IBM investing a ton in the 360 and that working out very nicely but you know you can also go back to the Iliad and read another case where sunk cost fallacy dominated rational strictly rational decision making and you know only divine intervention could ultimately lead to a good outcome for for the attacker and even then maybe not suchDwarkesh Patel 0:52:04great outcome often considered the that particular question about where trying to predict if somebody is overstepping or if they're making the best bet of their life is something that I've been trying to think about and I really have no reasonable method for I mean if you think about like what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter is this like Napoleon trying to conquer Russia and it's this super ego filled and pride filled you know completely illogical bet from somebody who has just had like 20 consecutive wins in a row and he thinks he's invincible or is it like Elon Musk like 20 years ago where he's like yeah I did PayPal and now let's you know let's build some rockets and let's build some electric vehicles yeah exactly and in each of these cases there's there's like so many analogies to like complete bust and there's so many analogies to oh this is just like part one of this grand plan and how do you figure out what which one is happening like how do you distinguish the visionary from the collapsing you know star the cynical answer is you wait about 200 years and thenByrne Hobart 0:53:18you write about how it was obvious all along like yeah you you really don't and I mean even there are a lot of cases that are actually still ambiguous so like Alexander you know conquered most of the known world at least most of the world that that people knew of around where he grew up and and then just goes to Babylon and drinks himself to death and that's the end right you know there there could have been an alternate story where he gets his life together a little bit and runs a giant sprawling empire on the other hand like reading the story battle to battle a lot of it it actually is basically this Ponzi scheme where every time he conquers a city he gets enough enough to pay off the people he hired to help him conquer the city and then has to move to the next city because they want to get paid again and so he's sort of you know was sort of being chased by his his obligations the entire way through until he finally got got just ahead of them enough to get a lot of loot and and a lot of land that could give people instead of just giving money so giving them like bars of silver and things so so yeah even even that story it's very hard to say you know he he rolled the dice a bunch of times and he won every time so clearly he was just one of those people who's born to win maybe it was sort of like he actually backed himself into a bunch of corners over and over and over again and then desperately fought his way out every single time and then was just completely sick of it and burnt out by the time he was in his early 30s in terms of how you would figure it out in advance like I think some of it does come down to getting a sense of whether they're responding to circumstances or whether they actually have have a long-term plan but then lots of like you know there's probably nothing more dangerous than a long-term plan that someone actually has the means to execute you know five-year plan does not have a good connotation Stalin had some of those and didn't turn out well for for a lot of people so even within that there's there's some difficulty in evaluating like I think there's kind of that that meta-cynical layer where if they don't know what they're doing then probably it's dumb luck they keep succeeding on the other hand if they do know what they're doing then maybe you hope that the world is lucky enough that they get unlucky and can't actually pull off whatever it is that they're they're planning to do maybe I guess another thing would be is there is there like an end state that they can get to because I think you know someone like Alexander he basically just kept going until he couldn't go any farther until his troops were basically on the point of mutiny and then just turned around and went not all the way home but went to like the nicest place halfway home and hung out there and partied but you know if if the story if you look at someone if the story is less about conquest and more about reconquest and restoration of something then there are these natural limits you can say like you go this far and you don't go any farther because you've actually finished your task so something like you know I think like I don't actually know who was who what which generals were on the other side of Napoleon but the ones who chased him out of Russia like for them the master plan was not we're going to conquer all of Europe the master plan was like we're getting our country back and then we're going to chase him far enough that he doesn't feel like he can just wait a year and do this again when it's not winter so so maybe that's that's another way to constrain it but then then you end up naturally selecting for less ambitious people it's like one way to one way to have these guardrails on your behavior is just don't have very big ambitions so you might and in that case those people are also stuck responding to circumstances so so maybe maybe you just end up with many different iterations of the same thing on different scales where everyone is stuck in certain historical circumstances they have they have their skills they have their opportunities they can they can go after some things maybe they achieve great things maybe they fail but either way eventually their luck runs out or they run out of ideas and then there's nothing to do except go home or just keep trying to keep keep being bolder until you eventually fail on most particularly I I don't really I don't really understand it I think there's like a remote possibility that he actually has a bunch of specific concrete ideas for how to increase Twitter's free cash flow and how to pay down the debt and make it a more profitable company maybe he just had that sense that it was overstaffed and that it should survive with a smaller headcount and if you cut headcount enough then you you end up with with a profitable business it could also just have been fun and seems fun so far and I think like that you know the the pursuit of fun is is not to be discounted like you if you're super rich you can afford to do all sorts of things varying levels of entertainment but it may be that the only thing that is actually like truly novel thrill seeking fun opportunity is something like buy Twitter and then turn it into you know what it is and it is like there's I think Rostad that at this this point about how the nature of Twitter's legitimacy has changed and that now it is a it is under the rule of a single monarch instead of ruled by these sort of faceless bureaucracies so now you know if something if Twitter does something you don't like there's actually a specific person you can blame and because you have Twitter you can actually yell at that person and potentially get an answer whereas if Twitter bans you because you made a joke and the joke looked like it was serious there's really there's no recourse and you know there's there's nothing lower status than someone like arguing with someone in authority about how serious or they should take your jokes there's like you know it's like a weird component of and it works both ways so like there's I think I started noticing this years ago because there are these underscore TXT Twitter accounts where they're just posting out of context comments from some niche community and the comments always sound deranged in a lot of cases to me the comments read as someone who is doing a bit they're playing a role they know it's funny they're exaggerating for their friends and then you take it out of context and read it as totally seriously and then you get to say these people are all like this they're all crazy but it is like it is a marker of high status to be able to not get jokes and to you know be able to be like righteously angry at someone because they made a joke and if they've been serious that would have been an appalling thing to say but they obviously weren't if you if you can get away with saying no I actually don't think it was a joke at all these people are humorless and they must have been totally serious then that's that's actually you know that's cool that's high status makes you impressive but yeah must like must must rule as this more you know personal monarch I think it's a it speaks to this question of legitimacy like why do people trust moderation and why do they trust sites to operate in the way that they do and you can either say these are like really high quality institutions so you know you can take the discourse as the oblivion approach and say we built these systems such that anyone can be dropped in and can do a reasonably good job

Andrew Janssens hosts Nik Milanović, Founder of This Week in Fintech, a digest of global FinTech news, and General Partner of The Fintech Fund. In this episode we cover topics including: - How This Week in Fintech evolved from Nik's weekly updates to his teammates and friends - Nik's early start in microfinance and how it has affected his philosophy on fintech - How we can build more diverse communities in fintech - Nik's love of music (specifically DJ-ing) About Nik Milanović Nik Milanovic, is the Founder of This Week in Fintech, and General Partner of the Fintech Fund. Prior to This Week in Fintech and the Fintech Fund, Nik was hire #1 at Funding Circle, led Strategy at Petal and subsequently led BD and Strategy for Google Pay and Google Finance. About This Week in Fintech This week in Fintech is a digest of all things in global Fintech. From a single weekly newsletter it has grown to coverage of fintech news around the world. For more FinTech insights, follow us below: WFT Medium: medium.com/wharton-fintech WFT Twitter: twitter.com/whartonfintech WFT Instagram: instagram.com/whartonfintech Andrew's Twitter: twitter.com/Adhjanssens Andrew's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/andrew-p-janssens/

$50 from each FULCRUM fan means we can publish throughout 2023 without interruption! What is real news — without compromise — worth to you? Thank you to everyone who has already thrown in, we greatly appreciate it! Ethereum — and Bitcoin — have experienced quite the recovery over the last month or so. Screenshot from Google Finance earlier on 10/26/2022 https://paypal.me/davidseaman for cards/fiatBTC:18xyJ9B28qDcv7fz2YKXFezvDFH99NghUi

L'essentiel des nouvelles économiques, financières et technologiques aujourd'hui[texte complet ou presque, ni révisé ni corrigé à des fins de publication]Elon Musk veut à nouveau acheter TwitterLe patron de Tesla tentait depuis plusieurs mois d'annuler la promesse qu'il avait faite en avril d'acheter les réseau social. Mais il aurait récemment signifié à Twitter que, finalement, il était à nouveau d'accord pour conclure la transaction au prix initialement entendu de 54,20 $US par action, soit l'équivalent de 44 milliards $US.Cela éviterait un procès, qui doit avoir lieu ce mois-ci, entre Musk et Twitter. Le procès avait été intenté par Twitter contre le patron de Tesla pour, justement, le forcer à faire l'acquisition.--Les bourses canadiennes et américaines ont monté pour un 2e jour consécutif. À Toronto, l'indice S&P/TSX a gagné 2,6%. Aux États-Unis, le Nasdaq a gagné 3,3%, le S&P 500, 3% et le Dow Jones, 2,8%. Le fournisseur montréalais de logiciel de vente Lightspeed recrute un ancien vice-président de Google, Ryan Tabone, qui devient chef du produit et de la technologie. Ryan Tabone a passé 15 ans chez Google, récemment comme vice-président et directeur général de Google Pay et Google Finance. Mastercard lance un logiciel pour prévenir les fraudes liées aux cryptoactifsL'outil s'appelle Crypto Secure. Il doit permettre aux émetteurs de cartes de crédit – souvent des banques – de déceler si les cartes qu'ils émettent servent à acheter des cryptoactifs qui font l'objet d'une fraude. L'objectif est d'éviter aux détenteurs de carte d'acheter, sans le savoir, des cryptoactifs frauduleux.L'entreprise technologique américaine Micron va investir 100 milliards $US sur 20 ans dans l'État de New York pour y construire la plus grande usine de semi-conducteurs des États-Unis. À terme, l'usine pourrait employer 50 000 personnes. Le groupe bancaire britannique HSBC envisage de vendre sa division canadienne, selon des informations rapportées par plusieurs médias. La branche canadienne de HSBC est la septième plus grande banque au Canada. Sa vente pourrait rapporter environ 10 milliards $ à HSBC. Bombardier Produits récréatifs (BRP) a commencé à construire au Mexique sa première usine de fabrication de véhicules électriques. L'entreprise de Valcourt, en Estrie, a récemment annoncé des investissements dans le secteur des véhicules fonctionnant sans essence et axés vers la mobilité urbaine. Flo, une filiale de la firme AddÉnergie, de Québec, a inauguré sa première usine en sol américain. Elle est située à Auburn Hills, dans le Michigan. Flo veut y fabriquer plus de 250 000 bornes de recharge pour véhicules électriques en vue de les vendre aux conducteurs américains.---Pour plus de détails sur ces nouvelles et pour d'autres nouvelles: https://infobref.comPour vous abonner aux infolettres gratuites d'InfoBref: https://infobref.com/infolettresPour voir en vidéo notre épisode hebdomadaire «à retenir cette semaine»: https://bit.ly/infobref-youtubePour des commentaires et suggestions, ou pour commanditer InfoBref Affaires: editeur@infobref.com Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Welcome to the Nichols Podcast! On this episode, Alston discusses the importance of looking at the trends and patterns of stocks in the market and deciding whether you want to invest in a stock long term or short term. Lastly, here are a few sites you can go to to learn more about stocks: Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, Fidelity and E-Trade. Please share this information with your family and friends. If you have any questions feel free to email Alston at vonclar@att.net. Hope you enjoy this episode!

They couldn't kill Bitcoin, though. Because none of us gave up! None of us gave in! Bitcoin 5-day chart via Google Finance (screenshot taken 7/20/22) https://www.fulcrumnews.com/subscribe https://paypal.me/davidseaman - for tips

The King is dead, or are they? Indeed, the Google Finance chart seems to imply that Netflix is in horrible shape. From a 52-week high of almost $700, its stock sits at $218.22 as Thursday, 21st April. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/keith-teare/support

Investing can often feel extremely complex! What are stocks? What is the stock market? In this episode, Mills (with a little help from her nieces) explains why diversifying your investments is not as complex as it may seem.  In this continuing series of investment tips and 2022 challenges, Mills shows us that beyond The Wall Street Journal, Google Finance, and endless streams of financial news…there is a tried and true way of investing in multiple publicly traded companies with much less risk and larger long-term rewards. Topic Include: What Exactly is a Lazy Investor? Explaining Dollar Cost Averaging How do ETFs Benefit Investors  What is The S&P 500? Official Mills Knows Bills Website: https://www.millsknowsbills.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/millsknowsbills Youtube: http://youtube.com/millsknowsbills TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@millsknowsbills LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ameliabender Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/millsknowsbills Twitter: https://twitter.com/bendermills Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/millsknowsbills

Una pestaña dedicada a las criptomonedas fue añadida en Google Finance. Te contamos todos los detalles! Para más información puedes consultar asnews.mx

Link Merchandise Podcast Jurnal Lembu: https://tees.co.id/stores/LembuTambunShop/ • Tahun 2007 Google mah belum bisa baca data di pasar modal, grafiknya, fundamentalnya. Tapi sekarang gak kalah aerunya. Sebagai pembaca data, Google mampu menganalisa data perkembangan suatu emiten. Gokilllss. Jadi perusahaan macam RTI BUSINESS, IDNFINANSIALS, INVESTING.COM bisa lewat dan dikalahkan Google sebagai penyedia data. Yuk simak kelebihan Google Finance. Capcus!!! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/jurnal-lembu/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jurnal-lembu/support

Some of the leading cryptos still seeing gains as of Tuesday morning, proving to some that the market sentiment has far more than Elon Musk's recent SNL visit going for it. Litecoin up about half a percent to $362 or so, according to Google Finance data. Ethereum, doing well also, Ether $3,957 each as of earlier today.Whether the market excitement can continue, though, is another question.The rapidly escalating Colonial Pipeline ransomware situation, which some industry analysts are suggesting could send gas prices on the east coast above $3 a gallon, seems to be a possible crypto Pearl Harbor. Details on today’s episode.tips: 1AbST3a71p9CT7NfqXbn35VLJmHLDWNNg6ETH tips: 0x157aCDc999e65FeAe2E0A23F541c5dc4Ff2D434A

In today’s news update — this week the leading cryptos, including Bitcoin and Ether, touched new highs in the wake of crypto wallet provider Coinbase’s Nasdaq IPO in the United States. It has been noted that Bitcoin reached a $1 trillion presumed market valuation (calculated by the value of all bitcoins in existence, that is) roughly in half the time it took Amazon to become a $1 trillion company. Amazing when it is put into perspective like that — although, of course, Bitcoin is not a stock or a company, so we may be comparing apples to oranges here. Bitcoin values as of earlier on 4/16/21, via Google Finance (screenshot). David’s new book: https://www.amazon.com/Winner-Take-All-Bitcoin-Ether/dp/B08Z4CNTVN/ Start reading our research publication this weekend in seconds on your Amazon Kindle device, and also in stock as a paperback. Peruse our full research library here: https://www.fulcrumnews.com/store-1

Today, I am doing a special session. It’s a review of a book called Bitcoin Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. Accessibility: ALearning: AEnjoyment: A OverviewBitcoin Billionaires is one of those books you could see being made into a movie. It’s not that far fetched given that the author, Ben Mezrich, also wrote the award winning “Social Network”, the movie about Facebook. In some ways, it feels like Bitcoin Billionaires continues that story except the focus is now shifted to the Winklevoss Twins. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss became famous as the tall, Harvard-educated, Olympic rowers who alleged that Mark Zuckerburg ripped them off while founding Facebook. The author weaves the bold story of how the twins became among the first bitcoin billionaires along with a colorful dose of bitcoin history. The Winklevoss twins founded Gemini, one of the largest US based crypto-exchanges and Nifty Gateway, a leading NFT marketplace. The book lays bare the tension between ideologues like Ronald Ver and businessmen like Tyler and Cameron. Additionally, key developments like the Mt Gox hack and the Cyprus banking crisis also feature in the story. Mezrich does a great job making bitcoin history fun to learn. Key storiesStoring bitcoin in banks: The twins have taken extreme measures to safeguard the private keys to their mountain of bitcoin. The private keys - a long alphanumeric code - are split up and stored in bank safety deposit boxes across the country. Funny how banks are keeping crypto safe probably without them even knowing it. 2013 Cyprus banking crisis: What would you do if you woke one morning and 10+% of your life savings were gone? This was the reality for bank account holders in Cyprus in 2013. The banks were too big to fail but the government didn’t have the funds to bail them out. As a last resort, the government dipped into all bank accounts while everyone slept. This set off a bitcoin price rally as consumers lost confidence in fiat currency. Flashforward to 2021, the US has printed unprecedented trillions of dollars related to COVID. There are rising concerns about the US government spending and the dollar’s value. Part of the current bitcoin bull run is motivated by investors seeking shelter for the funds.Silk Road takedown: Ross Ulbricht founded Silk Road to enable anonymous transactions. It quickly became synonymous with drug smuggling, human trafficking and money laundering. Silk Road used bitcoin as its primary currency until it was shut down in 2013. However, the damage was already done. Bitcoin had become associated with criminals and the dark web, a shadow it’s still struggling to shake today. Silicon valley vs crypto: Early bitcoin enthusiasts were outsiders in Silicon Valley. The Winklevoss twins were occasionally shunned by folks wary of not upsetting Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. This outsider mentality is helpful as an innovator and an entrepreneur. Along the way, bitcoin became less fringe and much of Silicon Valley has embraced cryptocurrency to some degree. Google has gone from banning crypto ads to adding cryptocurrency prices in Google Finance. Bitcoin ETF: The Winklevoss twins began the quest to launch the first US-based bitcoin ETF in 2013. 8 years later, there are now 2 Canada-based bitcoin ETFs but none in the US. Major firms like Fidelity have now also proposed ETFs. I think the SEC will eventually approve a US-based bitcoin ETF. This struggle highlights some of the difficulties associated with innovation and introducing a new asset class. Purists vs Pragmatism: There is some tension within the bitcoin community between purists and pragmatists. Some bitcoin purists are wary of the existing banking sector and governments. They would prefer to operate in a peer-to-peer, permissionless, tamper free environment without government oversight. On the other hand, pragmatists prefer to operate within the existing banking sector and seek government regulation to foster growth.Charlie Shrem: was the brains behind BitInstant. In 2012, BitInstant was the leading vehicle by which early adopters purchased bitcoin via a network of over 700,000 store locations.The author suggests that 23-year old Charlie was caught up in the tension between purists vs pragmatism. He was ambivalent about enforcing KYC (Know-Your-Customer) requirements and alerting authorities to suspicious transactions.  Ultimately, Charlie was arrested and imprisoned for money laundering. He was released in 2016. His fall from grace highlights the importance of coloring within the confines of the law and delegating (he served as CEO and Compliance Officer). The optimist in me is rooting for a comeback story for Charlie. Let’s see. ConclusionI really enjoyed Bitcoin Billionaires. I probably wharfed it down in a couple long reading sessions. The book is accessible and engaging. I highly recommend it for folks who are new to crypto and want to learn about the history and key characters. One day there will be a movie made about the times we are living in. Let me know what you think. As always, I appreciate book recommendations or any other feedback you might have. Have a great day! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit afolabio.substack.com

The Gentlemen of Crypto EP - 671 Talkshoplive: https://talkshop.live/streaming-content/5456 Cool Crypto Gear: https://www.adesignuk.com/ The Gentleman of Crypto is a daily live broadcast that explores Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency market. We discuss international topics, news updates, and future innovations in blockchain, digital currencies and assets. #bitcoin #cryptocurrency #altcoins #cryptonews Support "The Gentlemen of Crypto" by using our referral link to download the Brave Browser. https://brave.com/krb666 ********************************** Connect with us online at the following places: KRBE Digital Assets Group • Website: https://thegentlemenofcrypto.com • TGoC Podcast: http://pca.st/hdVR SOCIAL • KRBE Twitter: https://twitter.com/krbecrypto • KRBE Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/krbecrypto/ • KRBE Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/krbecrypto/ • King Twitter: https://twitter.com/KingBlessDotCom • Bitcoin Zay Twitter: https://twitter.com/bitcoinzay Business Inquiries: krbe@krbecrypto.com Donations welcome, but not necessary! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ **This is not financial advice. The expressed opinions in the video are of the speakers. You can lose all your money in the cryptocurrency market, so be sure to do your own research before investing.**The Gentleman of Crypto is a daily live broadcast that explores Bitcoin and cryptocurrency market. We discuss international topics, news updates, and future innovations in blockchain, digital currencies and assets, fintech, and more.fintech, and more.

Tether warns market of $20M Bitcoin extortion plot. Crypto miners cause energy crisis in Abkazhia. Hackers raid DeFi tool Furucombo for $14M. Google Finance site finally tracks cryptocurrency. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Michael Saylor responds to Warren Buffet's take that bonds are broken as a store of value, then corporate treasury reserve strategies employing bonds no longer work to preserve shareholder value. This will lead to more companies adding Bitcoin to their balance sheet. Google Finance has added crypto prices to the finance.google.com domain. The section, titled “Crypto,” now appears in the “Compare Markets” category alongside conventional stock and currency markets. The section provides key pricing information for various cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). OLB Group enables crypto payments for thousands of US merchants. Highclere Castle Spirits and Heritage Wine and Spirits based out of Kentucky have transacted the first payment between supplier and distributor in Bitcoin.

In this episode, my guests attempt to teach me (a qualitative researcher) about quantitative research. I speak to Dr Mohammad Mahbubur Rahman (http://globalhealth.port.ac.uk/team_member/dr-mohammad-mahbubur-rahman) about his research and finding the story in quantitative data, and Dr Shahidul Islam (https://www.uos.ac.uk/people/dr-shahidul-islam) helps explain some of the key features of quantitative research. The Guests... Dr Mohammad Rahman is a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Health and Care Professions at the University of Portsmouth, and Dr Shahidul Islam Lecturer in Accounting at University of Suffolk Business School. Dr Mohammad Rahman's work can be found here: Rahman MM. (2014) 'Estimating the Average Treatment Effect of Social Safety Net Programmes in Bangladesh' The Journal of Development Studies 50 (11), pp. 1550-1569 (https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2014.887688) Show notes... In this episode, Dr Shahidul Islam talks about a specific research paper of interest: Jie Chen, Woon Sau Leung, Marc Goergen (2017) 'The impact of board gender composition on dividend payouts' Journal of Corporate Finance, Volume 43, pp. 86-105 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2017.01.001) Shahidul also talks about using Google Finance data, which can be explored here: https://www.google.co.uk/finance Credit: Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

“To someone who’s not involved in this business you might think what's the big deal? But if you're in this business you think oh my god this is a big deal...but it really shouldn't be...and that's why we exist.” In today’s episode, Ryan Zauk sits down with Philip Brittan, Founder & CEO of Crux. You know that frustration when someone routinely sends you great data but they’ve added rows, changed date formats on you, or re-ordered tabs? Then all of your pulls, lookups, and macros need to be redone? Enter Crux, which Philip has built into the “humble, neutral utility” of data connections, or what he calls the “FedEx of financial data.” Crux ingests data sets from over 100 suppliers, then routinely cleans and standardizes them for delivery to end-users like hedge funds in the format they need. Building off partnerships with Snowflake, AWS, and a who’s who of strategic investors, Crux is transforming financial data. If you’ve spent time in this space, you know the scale of this problem. Philip has been in the FinTech space for over 30 years, first as a serial entrepreneur, then as an executive with Google Finance, Bloomberg, and Thomson Reuters. Philip has a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science from Harvard. In this episode, we go deep into Crux’s product, how they work with AWS and are taking advantage of the cloud explosion, the birth of their partnership with Two Sigma, why he only uses strategic funding, and much more. For more insights and analysis from FinTech leaders, follow us below: Medium: https://medium.com/wharton-fintech WFT Twitter: https://twitter.com/whartonfintech Ryan's Twitter: https://twitter.com/RyanZauk LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wharton-fintech-club/

Compilado semanal das principais notícias que aconteceram no cenário fintech no Brasil e no mundo, sempre aos domingos no Youtube, Facebook e no Spotify! Nesta edição: - Fintech Quanto, voltada ao Open Banking, recebe aporte do Itaú e do Bradesco; - Bradesco cria a carteira BITZ em parceria com a Cielo; - BTG Pactual entra no mercado de varejo com bancos digitais voltados para PF e PMEs; - Algumas novidades em relação à segurança no Pix são divulgadas; - Fintech Uruguaia dlocal torna-se o primeiro unicórnio do país; - Fintech norte-americana Chime ultrapassa Nubank e torna-se neobank mais valioso do ocidente; - Corretora Kraken, dos EUA, consegue licença para operar como banco no país; - Google reformula seu produto Google Finance e transforma-o em ferramenta para educação financeira de investidores; - Neobank australiano 86 400 lança funcionalidade de comparação de produtos financeiros utilizando potencial do open banking. Estamos também no Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin e Spotify! Siga-nos em: https://www.instagram.com/fintechtalksbr https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/fintech-talks/ https://www.facebook.com/fintechtalksbr/ https://open.spotify.com/show/2AVngeMgLIO7r8cqwGYBPY

This week on the Sociall.in Social Media and Digital Marketing Podcast we talk about Android 11, Google redesigning Finance, and Autocomplete for political search terms.

Today in regular trading, shares of American electric car manufacturer Tesla surged past the $500 mark. Tesla, perhaps the most famous electric vehicle company in the world, has had tumultuous last twelve months on the public markets. The company's shares have traded as low as $176.99 in the past 52 weeks, and, as has high as $507.50 today. The company is worth $507.28 per share at the moment, valuing Tesla at $91.38 billion according to Google Finance.

Google's vice president of finance, has joined Postmates' board of directors, the latest sign that the on-demand food delivery startup is prepping to take the company public. Postmates announced Friday that Kristin Reinke, vice president of Finance at Google, will join the San Francisco startup as an independent director. Reinke has been with Google since 2005. Prior to Google, Reinke was at Oracle for eight years.

Visit us at divorceandyourmoney.com for the #1 divorce resources in the USA and get personalized help. Learn about coaching services here.   Thank you for listening! Find a transcript of this episode below.   A subject that's been coming up a lot recently in coaching calls is stock options, and many of you have them and you may not realize it, or you do know they exist, but you're trying to figure out what you should do with stock options. And stock options are actually a pretty complicated subject. They're one of the most complicated financial instruments even when the divorce process isn't involved. And when you add divorce on top of it, trying to decide what you do with the stock option, whether you keep them, split them, how do you negotiate for them? They're tough.   I remember when I was much younger, I still have on my bookshelf an old book about stock options and it is one of the hardest to read books that I've ever purchased because they are a very complicated subject. But because it's the podcast, I'm going to, of course, simplify it for you and try and make it as easy as possible. And I want to give you an overview of stock options, what to think about with them in the divorce context.   Some of you may have them and not realize you have them. Some of you might not have them at all, and which point this episode might just be some general education on stock options, or maybe you know someone who's a friend who has them. But I'm going to go through kind of what they are, how they work, why they're important. They're one of those assets in divorce that if you have them, they can be very, very valuable. In some cases, I've had cases were stock options are the most valuable asset in the divorce and other times, stock options can be worthless. They are a very fascinating subject in that regard.   But let's start with the basics. And by the way, in my book, Divorce And Your Money, The No Nonsense Guide, I have a short chapter on stock options that explains what these are and why you need to be thinking about them. What stock options are, I call them stock options or employee stock options, it's a form of compensation and basically, it gives you a right but not an obligation to buy a certain number of shares in a company, in the company that you work for usually, at a specified price.   Now, what does all of that mean? It basically means that stock options give an employee the benefit or give employees the opportunity or the ability to benefit when a company goes up in value. Stock options also give an incentive for an employee to stick around at a company rather than leave. And the way it does that is it says, "Hey, you get a certain percentage or you can buy shares of stock at a discounted," I won't call it a discounted price, but you can get stock in this company and appreciate in its growth.   And if you are or your spouse is an executive in a company, but don't have to be an executive, can be at many different levels, but most of my clients are generally executives or pretty high up in a company when they think about options. You can have these stock options there and it says you're a part owner in a company, basically. There's some specific mechanics to it that make them a little bit more complicated than just being a normal owner, but they basically give you ownership.   And if you're at a public company, in a company will usually have thousands of employees, it has a stock market ticker. You can look up the price for it. I know lots of people who have stock options at public companies. They're a very common form of compensation. Actually, even when I was working at my very first job out of college, I was working at JP Morgan and they gave stock options basically to everyone as a form of compensation and to keep you at the company longer. You get a big bonus of stock options.   And then if you work at a private company, and so this is the private company side is actually pretty complicated when it comes to stock options, but if you work at a private company like a tech startup. At the time of this recording, I'll give you an example of a big name. Uber is a tech startup that you've all heard of. Well, most of their employees have lots and lots of stock options that could be very, very valuable. They are a sign of ownership in the company and it's a big form of compensation for the company.   And so at the end of the year, or at a certain time during the year, a company might say, "We're gonna give you part of your bonus in cash and part of your bonus in stock," and those stock are usually in the form of options. Now, the reason options are tricky is because of something called vesting. I'm not going to get into all the mechanics of vesting because it's just so complicated and it really varies on a case by case basis. But just because you have these stock options doesn't mean you have ownership in the company yet. As I said, they're still called options.   And because of this term vesting, it's basically just says that you don't own, you don't get a full value of your options just because you have them. You might get your options awarded to you the longer you stay at a company. So if you got $100 worth of stock options, well maybe only $10 have value today, but if you stay at the company for five years, you earn the rest of that money and you get the full value of those options.   So the point is that, I know this is difficult to grasp, but stock options are a piece of ownership in a company. They have a vesting schedule, they call it, but they vest and so you earn that ownership usually the longer you stay at that company over time. And if you leave the company before your stock has vested, that stock becomes useless.   That's not a point we're going to get into for the sake of this episode, but oftentimes in negotiations, when you're thinking about stock options and what you should do with them, if you or your spouse or whomever is going to leave the company with unvested stock, then that will become useless to you. Something very important to think about as well.   So whenever you have stock options, you're going to need to know that they exist and also you're going to need to know their vesting schedule. Now, that's just some basics on the stock options. Now, the real question is, what happens in a divorce context? The real thing to understand in a divorce context is the way you treat stock options in divorce varies substantially on one factor.   And that is, if your spouse is working for a private company, a company that's not listed on a stock market, whose shares don't trade every day, then the way you approach stock options in divorce is very different than if your spouse works for a public company. If your spouse works for a company like Bank of America, or Walgreens, or Best Buy or Walmart, or any number of big companies, there's also tons of publicly traded companies you may have never heard of before, but you can go online, you can look up their stock symbol, and you'll see a specific price for the share.   If your spouse works for a publicly traded company, then stock options are much, much easier to deal with. If your spouse works for a private company, then the stock, or you I should say, then the stock options are much more complicated in terms of how to split them in the considerations you should be thinking about as you try and figure out what to do with them.   Now, I was going to start with a public company example. So when I worked at JP Morgan, they gave stock options a lot. And basically, you can go online and you can type in, you can go to Yahoo Finance or Google Finance. You can type in "JP Morgan stock price" and you can look up the exact value of what each stock option is worth. And so if I had 10 ... So as of the time I record this, JP Morgan stock is worth about $100. Very easy. It's good for our math.   Let's just say they gave me a 10 shares of stock as part of my bonus. They actually give much, much more than that, but let's just say they gave 10 shares of stock as part of my bonus and options. And so I have 10 shares of stock at a stock price of $100, which means I have $1,000 worth of stock options. Well, if you are trying to figure out what to do with those stock options, that is a pretty easy thing to figure out because one of the biggest challenges with any asset is trying to figure out what it's worth.   Well, with a publicly traded stock, you know what the stock price is, you know how many shares of stock you have, and you just do some basic math and you come up with a value. In my case, I've got 10 shares of stock at about $100 a share. So I've got $1,000 of stock that I would have to split. Not much fancier than that. The only thing that's complicated is usually the math isn't that easy, but it's not much harder than that.   Where the complication comes is if your spouse works for a private company, and I've actually had this discussion on calls quite a bit, is the difference between a private company and a public company. Just so that you know, is private companies aren't listed on a stock exchange like the New York Stock Exchange, or the American Stock Exchange, or the Nasdaq or whatever. And so the value of the company isn't traded every day. And if you want to ... You can't just look up how much the company is worth.   A public company has a share price and you can buy and sell the stock every day, but the good thing about a public company is you can always look up what the market value is at any given time. With a private company, it might just be a few people who own it, might just be the employees who own it, or might just be an investment firm that owns it, and they won't necessarily tell you the exact value. And so when you're dealing with private company stock, the considerations get much, much more complicated. The reason is you don't know how much that stock is worth. The challenge with private company stock is valuing it. Private company stock, I'm not going to get into all the mechanics of it because it's way beyond what we could do and talk about in an episode that's useful to you, but one thing to consider, one thing that's weird about private company stock is it has no value until someone gives it a value. Now what does that mean?   Well, you can have private company stock. You can have 10,000 shares of private company stock that's worth one penny a share. So in theory, it's not worth that much, but what happens is with private companies, they might raise money from investors, in which case that penny a share that I talked about could become worth, all of a sudden, $2 a share instead of a penny a share. And so what was almost worthless before is now worth millions of dollars.   Or if that company gets bought, or if that company does any number of different transactions, those stock options, while initially on paper aren't worth anything, could become very valuable in the future. Private company stock is very weird in that regard. And when we think about it in a divorce context, it's one of the areas that causes a ton of complication because of this very issue. I had to work with a lot of attorneys on it, a lot of clients directly, and educate you that private company stock is a very complex area and thing to deal with and you have to be careful with it.   Let's just go through quickly what the difference is between private and public company stock in a divorce context and how you think about what you should do with it and try and come up with the best decision for you. If you have a public company stock or the company's traded, you can look up its value, you know the value. The value is clear. There's no real reason to split the stock and go through the complicated splitting process for stock options. It's usually not worth it.   Best thing to do is the person who has the stock keeps it. The person who doesn't have the stock gets credit for it, and you give up a little bit more of another asset to make up the value. But that's it. When it comes to ... It's simple. You treat the stock like a car. If you really want part of a publicly traded stock or you really wanted to split it, here's what I always say.   You can open up an e-Trade account, or a TD Ameritrade account, or a Schwab account or whatever and in five minutes, purchase that publicly traded stock. It's a very easy thing to purchase and there's no reason to add thousands of dollars of fees and complication trying to split publicly traded stock most of the time, or stock options most of the time. It's just not worth the effort. There's so many simpler ways to deal with it than splitting it.   When you're dealing with a private company stock, that is a very tricky area because we don't know what the value is. And so in general, most of the time when we're dealing with private company stock, you split it in half or you split it in whatever proportion you're splitting the assets. The reason is private company stocks value can fluctuate so quickly, so instantaneously that if you don't take your half the value, you could end up losing out quite a bit.   And there's definitely a lot of complications around it because it depends on how big the private company is and the mechanics of splitting the stock, et cetera, et cetera, but what the current value is of that stock. But many times, I see cases where the spouse who has stock options says, "Oh, these are worthless. We don't need to worry about the stock options. Let's just move on." And in theory, at the time they say that, they actually might be true, but the reason they have stock options is because they could have a lot of value later.   And so at this private company, it's a tech startup or whatever. I had a case like this this year where the person works at a tech company, the stock options aren't worth very much, but all of a sudden, a big investment firm in the middle of the divorce process, thankfully, comes in and says, "Hey, we're going to buy this company." And all of a sudden, those stock options which were worth a few thousand dollars at best, became worth hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars overnight and became a much bigger issue.   It sounds weird because it is, but that's also how stock options work, is oftentimes their value can fluctuate substantially, particularly with private companies where they're fast growth, valuing them as very, very difficult. And so the easiest way to get around that is by just splitting them evenly and therefore no one can lose out.   I'll give you another example, is if you are, say your spouse have stock options and the stock options are currently worth $1,000. Well you say, "Oh, I'm going to skip the stock options. I'm just going to get my share in the house and move on." Well, what if two years from now those stock options are worth a million dollars? How are you gonna feel about that? It's such a weird example, but that's how stock options can work.   Now also on the opposite side with stock options, this is something to consider, is they can also lose value. So you could say, "Actually, I want my share of those stock options," and it turns out the company goes bankrupt and they're worth nothing. So that's also a consideration as well. The point is there's a lot to think about if you have stock options. And if you're in the divorce process, you need to make sure you know that they exist and you really need to think through all of the different scenarios that could happen with these stock options so you can figure out, well, what is the best course of action for you later down the line with the options?   There's a lot of creative solutions that you can come up with for this very complicated asset. I hope I gave you a basic overview. It's not an intuitive subject and it's tough to explain and tough to explain clearly, but give you a basic overview of stock options. And if you have them, it's definitely an area, whether you have them or your spouse has them or you think you have them, it's definitely an area where you need to raise a red flag, make sure everyone has clear information as to exactly how they work, and from there, there's a lot to be thought about in terms of the divorce process, in terms of stock options and what the best strategy is for handling them.   It's an area that most attorneys, actually, I know aren't super well equipped to handle. Some are. There are definitely a handful of great attorneys out there who are super financially savvy who know the ins and outs of stock options better than me, but the average attorney off the street, certainly not. And actually, even many financial advisors, even good ones, don't know how to handle stock options well. And there's only a handful of people who really have good expertise in the stock option world.   If I were actually going to ... I'm going to leave you with a nugget. I love to give you resources and things to check out. One area or one person who's very, very good with stock options is a certified financial planner, a CFP. If you or your spouse have stock options and you're thinking about what to do with them in divorce, of course you can call me.   But there's also local certified financial planners who can help you think about the calculations, walk you through all the ins and outs of stock options in your specific scenario, and help you figure out, what are the best courses of action given this highly complicated, highly unusual asset that actually, a lot more of you have and you don't even realize that you have it or maybe you have an inclination that you have it but haven't really given thought to it in the divorce process.   So you can get a CFP, certified financial planner, contact me, or make sure you have an attorney who is very savvy in terms of the ins and outs of stock options because they are one of the most complicated areas for you to think about.  

Patrick and I had a great opportunity to discuss his background as a Navy Surface Warfare Officer, now reserve officer, who transitioned to Business School followed by employment in Customer/Partner Operations with Google.   Patrick designs and executes processes within Google Finance to onboard and incubate new forms of payment, product expansion to new currencies and countries and verifying that bank recon, AUP, partner operations and PS&D are working correctly prior to hand-off. He is responsible for implementing EU GDRP regulations across Cash and Revenue Operations for the organization.   He is a founding member of DetBozeman and an avid craft beer enthusiast!

What websites does Gregory prefer for financial resources and business news. Yahoo Finance was one of the best financial hubs for a long time until Google Finance showed up. However, Google Finance has been through some changes over the last year that hasn't helped their standing. Ultimately, Gregory relies on market information most people don't have access to. Gregory and James discuss some other websites used to keep up with your money. Gregory stresses the importance of Beneficiary Designations, and keeping them up to date. These forms are often neglected. Qualified accounts, annuities, and life insurance all bypass the will and need a current beneficiary designation. Chuck in Mandeville asks Gregory about using Dividend Aristocrats. How should yields affect your decision to buy or sell a stock? Sean in Kenner is wanting to know how he should take advantage of the retirement options through his employer. There's already contributions going to a pension and Roth IRA. How does Gregory rate his plan? Sean also wants to know how fixed annuities should be used in the mix. Robert texts in from the Winning at Life app and asks Gregory who will be the big winners in the business world if North Korea agrees to peace? Dwayne Stein our mortgage pro in the Total Wealth Authority and host of Mortgage Gumbo says this Korea meeting could ease rates a bit, but the Fed will be moving them up regardless. Jose in Gretna plans on retiring next year. When should he turn on his Social Security and Medicare? Wallace in Gulfport asks Gregory to explain what it means when a 401k fund is aggressive. Dwayne Stein talks about how Reverse Mortgage rules have drastically changed in the last 10 years, and some of the older loans can have tighter math. Reverse Mortgages and refinances will be affected by rising interest rates. Valerie calls in from New Orleans to ask Dwayne Stein what home buying programs are available. Jonathan in West Virginia asks Dwayne Stein if the rate he is offered on a new loan sounds like a good deal. Dwayne Stein talks about how the record setting levels of consumer debt can be linked to rising home values, but how long can both be going up? Dwayne tells the story of a 72 year old on the Gulf Coast who is retiring, and is using a reverse mortgage from Mortgage Gumbo to turn on an income stream from his home. Herbert on Facebook asks Gregory about paying off old debts. If a bill goes to a collection agency, is it better to pay the agency or the original business? Gregory gives guidance on how to find out. Sports betting may be legal in Mississippi as soon as Monday, and we should have an answer before the end of the Supreme Court season through June. In retirement, do you really need two cars? Gregory and James discuss what it means to have your own car at your disposal. Ken in Harvey warns that if Louisiana legalizes sports betting, it would not be able to host NCAA events anymore. Gregory reviews how your Social Security benefits can be affected if you turn on your benefit before Full Retirement Age while continuing to work. It's a little more complicated than it sounds. James shares a glitch in the Matrix: he sends Mother's Day flowers a day early to avoid the upcharge on delivery. Eddie in Slidell asks about how delaying Medicare can lead to higher premiums. Matthew in Metairie asks Gregory about the pros and cons between a debt consolidation loan and a debt management system. http://www.WinningAtLife.com

This week on Young Bucks the panel is discussing a recent Bloomberg article ranking the best business schools in the country. We also cover sales stats from Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Stick around for this week's callout, as Ben discusses the overhaul and changes to the Google Finance platform. Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TuskMediaLLCPlease see disclosures.

This week on Young Bucks the panel is discussing a recent Bloomberg article ranking the best business schools in the country. We also cover sales stats from Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Stick around for this week's callout, as Ben discusses the overhaul and changes to the Google Finance platform. Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TuskMediaLLCPlease see disclosures.

In today's podcast, Alex will look at a company we found after analyzing Johnson Controls called Adient that was from a spin-off. It looks like a much better investment after Johnson Controls merged with Tyco because of the growth potential. Like usual, Alex will review: Google Finance - high level analysis Finviz - fundamental analysis Investor Relations - Adient Given the stock is a Dividend Reinvestment Plan, Alex's niche, make sure to find it on Wells Fargo Investment Services. If you have questions or comments, please send an email into alex.richwagen@gmail.com, or visit the website alexrichwagen.com Thanks! Alex

In today's podcast, Alex will look at a new company, Johnson Controls, which recently merged with Tyco. Although the deal looks good on the surface, Alex will dive into what happened to the stock post-merger, what it really means, and actually find a new investment idea with the research. He will review: Google Finance - high level analysis Finviz - fundamental analysis Investor Relations - Johnson Controls International Given the stock is a Dividend Reinvestment Plan, Alex's niche, make sure to find it on Wells Fargo Investment Services. If you have questions or comments, please send an email into alex.richwagen@gmail.com, or visit the website alexrichwagen.com Thanks! Alex

In today's podcast, Alex will look at comparing two large home improvement retailers. Weeks back, he discussed these as possible investments post-hurricane, and they are both up! Now which is better. Alex will dive into each stock with their analysis by using: Google Finance - high level analysis Finviz - fundamental analysis Gurufocus - specifically looking at Inventory Turnover If you have questions or comments, please send an email into alex.richwagen@gmail.com, or visit the website alexrichwagen.com Thanks! Alex

In today's podcast, Alex will look under the hood at a defensive stock, WTR, that is utility known as Aqua America. Listen to the show to find out why you should consider this for your portfolio as a possible low risk investment with some growth potential. During the show, he will go through his standard 3-step process to analyze the stock 1. Google Finance (high level) 2. Finviz.com (technicals & fundamental analysis) 3. BBT Investor Relations (future projects on the company) The stock, WTR, can be found under the DRIP umbrella, Computershare.com to invest directly with the company at an affordable cost. If you have questions or comments, please send an email into alex.richwagen@gmail.com, or visit the website alexrichwagen.com Thanks! Alex

In today's podcast, Alex will look under the hood at a defensive stock, WTR, that is utility known as Aqua America. Listen to the show to find out why you should consider this for your portfolio as a possible low risk investment with some growth potential. During the show, he will go through his standard 3-step process to analyze the stock 1. Google Finance (high level) 2. Finviz.com (technicals & fundamental analysis) 3. BBT Investor Relations (future projects on the company) The stock, WTR, can be found under the DRIP umbrella, Computershare.com to invest directly with the company at an affordable cost. If you have questions or comments, please send an email into alex.richwagen@gmail.com, or visit the website alexrichwagen.com Thanks! Alex

In today's podcast, Alex will look under the hood at an investment holding company, BBT, and find out why millenials getting into housing could be the key to its success. During the show, he will go through his standard 3-step process to analyze the stock 1. Google Finance (high level) 2. Finviz.com (technicals & fundamental analysis) 3. BBT Investor Relations (future projects on the company) The stock, BBT, can be found under the DRIP umbrella, Computershare.com to invest directly with the company at an affordable cost. If you have questions or comments, please send an email into alex.richwagen@gmail.com, or visit the website alexrichwagen.com Thanks! Alex

¡Muy buenos días a todos! Algunos me habéis enviado correos electrónicos preguntándome el nivel de los cursos y yo os lo repito. Son cursos básicos, para la gente que empieza, para aquellos que se acaban de topar con este sector y que hace falta explicarles las bases. De hecho, hay muchas personas que en muchos casos también deberían repasar las bases para poder recordar cosas que después me quedo abrumado cuando se les preguntan. Cosas como: ¿El Ask es el precio de la compra o el de la venta? ¿La demanda es más cara que la oferta o al revés? Para esas personas, siempre va bien tener un apoyo en vídeo y explicativo para repasar todos esos conceptos que como digo, son de base. Bien, pues volviendo al tema de hoy, hoy vengo a traeros una explicación detallada de las APIs en el mundo financiero y es que desde hace unos años…de hecho unos cuantos, la informática desembarcó con fuerza en el sector financiero, así como en otros sectores donde el uso de la informática ha hecho mella. Y es que este sector, como en otros, podemos comprobar que se ha incrementado en volumen, en participantes y en diferentes plataformas de acceso gracias a la tecnología. De hecho, gracias a esto, ahora todo el mundo puede acceder a ver el precio de una acción, un futuro, un índice o lo que sea casi a tiempo real. La informática que muchos no son arduos, otros son expertos y otros nos defendemos, sirve para infinidad de cosas y una de ellas es la obtención y trato de datos. Una de las cosas que más me gusta de este mundo tecnológico es que el acceso a información es cada vez más amplio, fácil y sobre todo diverso. Ahora existen maneras para obtener desde el tiempo en Kuala Lumpur o comprar en Amazon. Y todo se hace gracias a una tecnología de comunicación entre diferentes plataformas o servicios. Esta plataforma o protocolo es llamado API. Bien, de hecho, y para ser puristas, una API, tal y como dice la Wikipedia pertenece a las siglas de Application Programming Interface y no deja de ser un conjunto de subrutinas, funciones y procedimientos que ofrece cierta biblioteca para ser utilizado por otro software como una capa de abstracción. Para mí, es como explicar a un niño como usar la lengua. Es decir, una API para mí no deja de ser un protocolo que usamos para comunicarnos, para obtener información de alguien, aunque en este caso ese alguien es un ordenador, un servidor o una máquina a miles de kilómetros. O simplemente a metros. El hecho de tener internet en el móvil, Tablet, ordenador o en la tele, nos permite un acceso inmediato y es que este uso no solo nos permite llegar a la fuente de información, sino que también nos permite procesar información y eso, en los tiempos que corren y como hemos visto con empresas que tienen mucha información, la información, los datos, son poder. Y es que como digo, hoy vengo a hablaros de las APIs. Más concretamente las APIs financieras. Hoy en día mucha gente se llena la boca de la palabra FINTECH y todo lo que rodea. Pero poca gente creo que sabe realmente el uso explícito de esta combinación de finanzas y tecnología. Bien, pues voy a daros algunas APIs que creo que tienen un valor muy alto en cuanto a obtención de datos a tiempo real y a datos importantes y que, en algunos casos, el uso de estas APIs nos permite llegar antes a los trades, entender qué está pasando o incluso poder hacer el propio trade. Vamos a empezar con las clásicas APIs de trading: – Oanda: Bueno, creo que es la más fácil de usar y una de las más completas a nivel de programación. Ellos te permiten hacer casi de todo: ver tu historial de la cuenta, te permiten hace trading a través de ella y además te permiten obtener datos en tiempo real, tick a tick de todos los activos que tienen en el bróker. Que, en este caso, la mayoría son de Forex. Cabe decir que el uso de la API obviamente se necesita un usuario registrado pero que puede ser una demo, permitiendo jugar con miles de datos que tienen a nivel histórico de múltiples pares y a la vez, te permite conseguir una manejabilidad espectacular gracias al uso de sus pequeños ejemplos que muestran, en diferentes lenguajes en su página web. La verdad, es que es un lujo siempre poder trabajar con este bróker. Te facilita la vida y a la vez, te permite hacer muchas cosas de forma gratuita. Un 10 por ellos. – Interactive Brokers es, para mí, el bróker por excelencia en cuanto a acciones y futuros. Para mí no hay bróker a nombrar tan importante como este. De hecho, para mi es tan importante que el uso de su API, si eres semiprofesional o profesional, es casi obligado. Con miles de ejemplos en internet, también podemos hacernos con una cuenta demo o real (recordad que a partir de 10.000€) y que nos ayuda a acceder a tiempo real a datos de sus servidores como lo hace Oanda, aunque con la amplia diferencia que el número de activos que se pueden usar, el número de productos financieros posibles con esta API es altamente incomparable. Hablo de centenares de activos de todas las clases y, además, del uso de un acceso directo, completo y muy robusto que miles de personas alrededor del mundo usan con sus propios algoritmos. Sin duda, si eres amante de este tipo de microservicios, usadla. Vale la pena. Obtención de datos a gran escala de muchas empresas, índices o valores un poco más internacionales: – Yahoo! y Google finance: lo agrupo porque no veo mucha diferencia. La verdad es que son servicios que, aunque sea un gran amante de Google y de sus productos, aquí tengo que nombrarlo, pero a la vez, criticarlo. Sé de muy buena tinta que Google tiene una división específica para finanzas y que tienen algoritmos financieros corriendo haciendo cruce de datos y ganan dinero de ello, como no. El hecho es que Google Finance les debe dar mucho dinero o muy poco, pero espero que lo hagan todo a través de su API. Igual que lo hace Yahoo!. Y digo esto porque las dos grandes compañías tienen un servicio web de finanzas que da pena. De hecho, aún me quedo corto. Me duele decir esto y criticarlo así, pero no entiendo como entidades tan grandes que se dedican a internet, tengan una web tan pobre, tan antigua y tan poco útil como las aplicadas a finanzas. Es por eso que os aviso. Si usáis este servicio de estas dos compañías, usad la API. Va espectacularmente genial. Rápida, efectiva y con una gran versatilidad de usos. Te permite hacer de todo con todo tipo de empresas de alrededor del mundo y eso si, gratuitas si son datos a final de día. En el caso que quieras actualizados al segundo, tienes que pasar por caja. Pero el hecho de esto es que han podido integrar sus servicios con sus famosos Google Drive y Spredsheet o Excel online. Esto nos permite conectar y tratar estos datos sin descargarnos nada en nuestro ordenador. Todo a distancia. Esto es una maravilla y nos permite hacer un swing trading estudiado de una o varias carteras solo con un Excel conectado a los datos de Google Finance. Probadla. Vale la pena para acciones e índices. APIs alternativas que usan algunos bancos – Saxo Bank usa un feed de datos de Twitter para obtener la información en primera instancia para conseguir la información como si de Bloomberg, de la CNN o de la BBC se tratase y es que el feed de Twitter, bien configurado puede hacernos llegar mucha información que nos ayuda a entender qué pasa en el mundo de una manera instantánea. Pero es que esto es como todo. Hace falta saber a quién seguro, configurarlo muy bien y, sobre todo, saber discernir la información verídica de la falsa ya que como sabéis, en Twitter hay mucha información que es de dudosa reputación y, sobre todo, como ya ha pasado alguna vez, depende de si han hackeado una cuenta y han empezado a publicar cosas como ya ha pasado en ciertas ocasiones. Estoy hablando del incidente que pasó hace unos meses atrás, en el cual hackearon la cuenta de una muy muy conocida televisión económica americana y se twittearon 2 tweets que hacían referencia a que el avión presidencial del presidente de los estados unidos, creo que por aquel entonces había Obama en el gobierno, se había estrellado. El majestuoso Air Force One estrellado. Pues supongo que alguno de vosotros diréis: ¿pero esto que tiene que ver con la economía? Pues imaginaos cuanta gente está siguiendo este tipo de feeds de datos que se movió el índice de referencia SP500 haciendo un poco de miedo entre algunas personas (o incluso puedo deducir que incluso hay máquinas detrás leyendo este tipo de datos.) para hacer mover el precio ante el miedo de un posible atentado presidencial. APIs provenientes de los bancos – Banc Sabadell: tenéis un api muy sencillo que permite conectarte a la cuenta bancaria tuya a través de unas credenciales que puede darte la posibilidad de crearte aplicaciones móviles por ejemplo para poder monetizar una idea que tengas o que realmente te apetezca conectar no sé, por ejemplo, una hoja Excel con tu banco para saber cuánto llevas gastado durante el mes y de qué manera. – BBVA: bueno, esta es la API más completa que he visto en un banco en España. De hecho, son varias APIs las que tienen y es que tiene 8 APIs diferentes divididas entre APIs sobre particulares, sobre empresa y sobre datos agregados en general. Obviamente los datos que muestran son datos que son anónimos y que precisamente se cuidan mucho en mostrarnos. No podremos ver nombres ni números de cuenta, pero si datos muy interesantes que nos dan informaciones como BBVA PayStats, la cual nos da estadísticas agregadas y anónimas de miles de transacciones (obviamente de las hechas con las tarjetas de BBVA y de las que se han usado a través de los TPVs que las tiendas tengan con el banco BBVA. Así podemos ver y analizar los hábitos de consumo de los clientes. O también podemos ver y tratar datos de tu propia cuenta. Vamos que han montado un ecosistema que lo que permite es conseguir el máximo de numero de datos para que tú los puedas tratar a tu antojo. ¡Y nada más por hoy! Espero que esto de las APIs os sea de interés y que os animéis a que empecéis a usarlas. Si os surgen dudas, por favor, escribidme al formulario de contacto de la página web. ¡Acordaros también de suscribiros al canal y de darme un me gusta en iVoox y 5 estrellas en iTunes! ¡Muchas gracias! ¡Hasta el lunes! La entrada 127. Programación en el mundo financiero aparece primero en Ferran P..

¡Muy buenos días a todos! Algunos me habéis enviado correos electrónicos preguntándome el nivel de los cursos y yo os lo repito. Son cursos básicos, para la gente que empieza, para aquellos que se acaban de topar con este sector y que hace falta explicarles las bases. De hecho, hay muchas personas que en muchos casos también deberían repasar las bases para poder recordar cosas que después me quedo abrumado cuando se les preguntan. Cosas como: ¿El Ask es el precio de la compra o el de la venta? ¿La demanda es más cara que la oferta o al revés? Para esas personas, siempre va bien tener un apoyo en vídeo y explicativo para repasar todos esos conceptos que como digo, son de base. Bien, pues volviendo al tema de hoy, hoy vengo a traeros una explicación detallada de las APIs en el mundo financiero y es que desde hace unos años…de hecho unos cuantos, la informática desembarcó con fuerza en el sector financiero, así como en otros sectores donde el uso de la informática ha hecho mella. Y es que este sector, como en otros, podemos comprobar que se ha incrementado en volumen, en participantes y en diferentes plataformas de acceso gracias a la tecnología. De hecho, gracias a esto, ahora todo el mundo puede acceder a ver el precio de una acción, un futuro, un índice o lo que sea casi a tiempo real. La informática que muchos no son arduos, otros son expertos y otros nos defendemos, sirve para infinidad de cosas y una de ellas es la obtención y trato de datos. Una de las cosas que más me gusta de este mundo tecnológico es que el acceso a información es cada vez más amplio, fácil y sobre todo diverso. Ahora existen maneras para obtener desde el tiempo en Kuala Lumpur o comprar en Amazon. Y todo se hace gracias a una tecnología de comunicación entre diferentes plataformas o servicios. Esta plataforma o protocolo es llamado API. Bien, de hecho, y para ser puristas, una API, tal y como dice la Wikipedia pertenece a las siglas de Application Programming Interface y no deja de ser un conjunto de subrutinas, funciones y procedimientos que ofrece cierta biblioteca para ser utilizado por otro software como una capa de abstracción. Para mí, es como explicar a un niño como usar la lengua. Es decir, una API para mí no deja de ser un protocolo que usamos para comunicarnos, para obtener información de alguien, aunque en este caso ese alguien es un ordenador, un servidor o una máquina a miles de kilómetros. O simplemente a metros. El hecho de tener internet en el móvil, Tablet, ordenador o en la tele, nos permite un acceso inmediato y es que este uso no solo nos permite llegar a la fuente de información, sino que también nos permite procesar información y eso, en los tiempos que corren y como hemos visto con empresas que tienen mucha información, la información, los datos, son poder. Y es que como digo, hoy vengo a hablaros de las APIs. Más concretamente las APIs financieras. Hoy en día mucha gente se llena la boca de la palabra FINTECH y todo lo que rodea. Pero poca gente creo que sabe realmente el uso explícito de esta combinación de finanzas y tecnología. Bien, pues voy a daros algunas APIs que creo que tienen un valor muy alto en cuanto a obtención de datos a tiempo real y a datos importantes y que, en algunos casos, el uso de estas APIs nos permite llegar antes a los trades, entender qué está pasando o incluso poder hacer el propio trade. Vamos a empezar con las clásicas APIs de trading: – Oanda: Bueno, creo que es la más fácil de usar y una de las más completas a nivel de programación. Ellos te permiten hacer casi de todo: ver tu historial de la cuenta, te permiten hace trading a través de ella y además te permiten obtener datos en tiempo real, tick a tick de todos los activos que tienen en el bróker. Que, en este caso, la mayoría son de Forex. Cabe decir que el uso de la API obviamente se necesita un usuario registrado pero que puede ser una demo, permitiendo jugar con miles de datos que tienen a nivel histórico de múltiples pares y a la vez, te permite conseguir una manejabilidad espectacular gracias al uso de sus pequeños ejemplos que muestran, en diferentes lenguajes en su página web. La verdad, es que es un lujo siempre poder trabajar con este bróker. Te facilita la vida y a la vez, te permite hacer muchas cosas de forma gratuita. Un 10 por ellos. – Interactive Brokers es, para mí, el bróker por excelencia en cuanto a acciones y futuros. Para mí no hay bróker a nombrar tan importante como este. De hecho, para mi es tan importante que el uso de su API, si eres semiprofesional o profesional, es casi obligado. Con miles de ejemplos en internet, también podemos hacernos con una cuenta demo o real (recordad que a partir de 10.000€) y que nos ayuda a acceder a tiempo real a datos de sus servidores como lo hace Oanda, aunque con la amplia diferencia que el número de activos que se pueden usar, el número de productos financieros posibles con esta API es altamente incomparable. Hablo de centenares de activos de todas las clases y, además, del uso de un acceso directo, completo y muy robusto que miles de personas alrededor del mundo usan con sus propios algoritmos. Sin duda, si eres amante de este tipo de microservicios, usadla. Vale la pena. Obtención de datos a gran escala de muchas empresas, índices o valores un poco más internacionales: – Yahoo! y Google finance: lo agrupo porque no veo mucha diferencia. La verdad es que son servicios que, aunque sea un gran amante de Google y de sus productos, aquí tengo que nombrarlo, pero a la vez, criticarlo. Sé de muy buena tinta que Google tiene una división específica para finanzas y que tienen algoritmos financieros corriendo haciendo cruce de datos y ganan dinero de ello, como no. El hecho es que Google Finance les debe dar mucho dinero o muy poco, pero espero que lo hagan todo a través de su API. Igual que lo hace Yahoo!. Y digo esto porque las dos grandes compañías tienen un servicio web de finanzas que da pena. De hecho, aún me quedo corto. Me duele decir esto y criticarlo así, pero no entiendo como entidades tan grandes que se dedican a internet, tengan una web tan pobre, tan antigua y tan poco útil como las aplicadas a finanzas. Es por eso que os aviso. Si usáis este servicio de estas dos compañías, usad la API. Va espectacularmente genial. Rápida, efectiva y con una gran versatilidad de usos. Te permite hacer de todo con todo tipo de empresas de alrededor del mundo y eso si, gratuitas si son datos a final de día. En el caso que quieras actualizados al segundo, tienes que pasar por caja. Pero el hecho de esto es que han podido integrar sus servicios con sus famosos Google Drive y Spredsheet o Excel online. Esto nos permite conectar y tratar estos datos sin descargarnos nada en nuestro ordenador. Todo a distancia. Esto es una maravilla y nos permite hacer un swing trading estudiado de una o varias carteras solo con un Excel conectado a los datos de Google Finance. Probadla. Vale la pena para acciones e índices. APIs alternativas que usan algunos bancos – Saxo Bank usa un feed de datos de Twitter para obtener la información en primera instancia para conseguir la información como si de Bloomberg, de la CNN o de la BBC se tratase y es que el feed de Twitter, bien configurado puede hacernos llegar mucha información que nos ayuda a entender qué pasa en el mundo de una manera instantánea. Pero es que esto es como todo. Hace falta saber a quién seguro, configurarlo muy bien y, sobre todo, saber discernir la información verídica de la falsa ya que como sabéis, en Twitter hay mucha información que es de dudosa reputación y, sobre todo, como ya ha pasado alguna vez, depende de si han hackeado una cuenta y han empezado a publicar cosas como ya ha pasado en ciertas ocasiones. Estoy hablando del incidente que pasó hace unos meses atrás, en el cual hackearon la cuenta de una muy muy conocida televisión económica americana y se twittearon 2 tweets que hacían referencia a que el avión presidencial del presidente de los estados unidos, creo que por aquel entonces había Obama en el gobierno, se había estrellado. El majestuoso Air Force One estrellado. Pues supongo que alguno de vosotros diréis: ¿pero esto que tiene que ver con la economía? Pues imaginaos cuanta gente está siguiendo este tipo de feeds de datos que se movió el índice de referencia SP500 haciendo un poco de miedo entre algunas personas (o incluso puedo deducir que incluso hay máquinas detrás leyendo este tipo de datos.) para hacer mover el precio ante el miedo de un posible atentado presidencial. APIs provenientes de los bancos – Banc Sabadell: tenéis un api muy sencillo que permite conectarte a la cuenta bancaria tuya a través de unas credenciales que puede darte la posibilidad de crearte aplicaciones móviles por ejemplo para poder monetizar una idea que tengas o que realmente te apetezca conectar no sé, por ejemplo, una hoja Excel con tu banco para saber cuánto llevas gastado durante el mes y de qué manera. – BBVA: bueno, esta es la API más completa que he visto en un banco en España. De hecho, son varias APIs las que tienen y es que tiene 8 APIs diferentes divididas entre APIs sobre particulares, sobre empresa y sobre datos agregados en general. Obviamente los datos que muestran son datos que son anónimos y que precisamente se cuidan mucho en mostrarnos. No podremos ver nombres ni números de cuenta, pero si datos muy interesantes que nos dan informaciones como BBVA PayStats, la cual nos da estadísticas agregadas y anónimas de miles de transacciones (obviamente de las hechas con las tarjetas de BBVA y de las que se han usado a través de los TPVs que las tiendas tengan con el banco BBVA. Así podemos ver y analizar los hábitos de consumo de los clientes. O también podemos ver y tratar datos de tu propia cuenta. Vamos que han montado un ecosistema que lo que permite es conseguir el máximo de numero de datos para que tú los puedas tratar a tu antojo. ¡Y nada más por hoy! Espero que esto de las APIs os sea de interés y que os animéis a que empecéis a usarlas. Si os surgen dudas, por favor, escribidme al formulario de contacto de la página web. ¡Acordaros también de suscribiros al canal y de darme un me gusta en iVoox y 5 estrellas en iTunes! ¡Muchas gracias! ¡Hasta el lunes! La entrada 127. Programación en el mundo financiero aparece primero en Ferran P..

If you are beginning investor, check out my show! In today's show, Alex will review Darden Restaurants(DRI), a well known restaurant chain that owns Bahama Breeze, Olive Garden, and others. He will use a three step process: 1. Google Finance (high level) 2. Finviz.com (technical & fundamental analysis) 3. Darden Investor Relations Bonus - discuss the hostile takeover from Starboard Hedge Fund Also, Alex looks into their financials further by exploring their 10-K (financial information) on SEC.gov to identify if it's a potential investment for your portfolio. As always, if you have questions, please send an email to alex.richwagen@gmail.com or visit alexrichwagen.com for further content like his book, Investing Should be Easy. Thanks! Alex

If you are beginning investor, check out my show! In today's show, Alex will review Honeywell (HON), a well known technology infrastruture company dedicated to serving aerospace, home/building, performance materials, and safety (cybersecurity). He will use a three step process: 1. Honeywell investor relations (future growth catalysts) 2. Google Finance (high level) 3. Finviz.com (technical & fundamental analysis) Also, Alex looks into their financials further by exploring their 10-K (financial information) on SEC.gov to identify if it's a potential investment for your portfolio. As always, if you have questions, please send an email to alex.richwagen@gmail.com or visit alexrichwagen.com for further content like his book, Investing Should be Easy. Thanks! Alex

If you are beginning investor, check out my show! In today's show, Alex will review Briggs and Stratton (BGG), a well known manufacturer and services provider for gas power engines found in lawn, garden, and turf care. He will use a three step process: 1. Google Finance (high level) 2. Finviz.com (technical & fundamental analysis) 3. Briggs and Stratton investor relations (future strategy) Also, Alex looks into their financials further by exploring their 10-K (financial information) on SEC.gov to identify if it's a potential investment for your portfolio. As always, if you have questions, please send an email to alex.richwagen@gmail.com or visit alexrichwagen.com for further content like his book, Investing Should be Easy. Thanks! Alex

Emotions have no place in investing. You rely on cold, hard data to make investing decisions. Today we’ll talk about ways to take the emotion out of buying stocks with the founder of Simply Wall Street.  We interview Al Bentley, wind-surfer, CEO and co-founder of Simply Wall Street, an Australian startup that helps people make better investing decisions by turning complex data into easily understood infographics. Buy and Hold Wins Again Confirming yet again the advice that LMM has been giving you from the start, Simply Wall Street does not advocate picking individual stocks but rather the buy and hold strategy. But because there are people who buy individual stocks, Simply Wall Street wants to give them the best information available in a way that is easy to understand so that they can take the emotion out of buying stocks and make right decisions. The site does get incredibly detailed on individual stocks even looking at things like CEO compensation, but when you visit, you’ll notice that one piece of information they don’t include shares price. It is part of the analysis, but they don’t want people to rely too much on that one bit of data. People get too hung up on price when deciding what stocks to buy. DIY Fund Simply Wall Street wants to allow people to pick individual stocks not so they can sell them off quickly, but so they can essentially build their own fund. Individual stocks shouldn’t make up your entire portfolio but using the information that SWS provides makes it easy to have direct shares as a part of your portfolio. Investing for the In-Betweeners There is certainly no shortage of information available to help you pick stocks, but a lot of it is not easily understood by normal people. And what can be easily understood, previous share price, for example, is not a good indicator. You can’t always predict the future by looking at the past. It’s important to look at certain ratios like P/E and P/S, but you need context to understand what those numbers are indicating. Some investors rely on things like Google Finance for information, but that was built by finance people for finance people. SWS wanted to create something for the rest of us, the layperson that doesn’t have all the technical knowledge that some finance people assume everyone has. The founders are not finance guys, so they don’t have those ingrained biases. They were investors though so understood the problems of investors. There are a lot of resources for brand new investors, things like Betterment and Robin Hood, and things for high-end investors but investors that fall between those two categories are under-served. Special Snow Flakes   SWS uses a system that is meant to analyze stocks that will be held long term. If you really want to nerd out, they open sourced their analysis model on Git Hub so you can have a look for yourself. There are five main components; Value: Value is based on future cash flow and its price relative to the stock market. Future: The expected performance in the next 1-3 years, based on estimates from up to 50 analysts. Past: The earnings performance over the previous five years. Health: A company’s financial health and their level of debt. This marker is critical to long-term investing. Income: The current dividend yield, its volatility, and sustainability. There is another factor that SWS looks at that many investors and advisors overlooks; management. How long has the board been serving, is the CEO grossly overcompensated, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Danielle asks: "The close price of shares on Google Finance is different to that on the Stock Exchange website. Is the data on Google Finance correct?" See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

   It’s been too long since we’ve done a five questions episode. Today we talk about lotto, stock games, APR, diversification, and student loans.  Five questions are back! We answer questions we get through e-mail and the LMM Community.  1. What would you do if you won the lottery?  Thomas doesn’t want money he didn’t earn so if he somehow won the lottery, he would hand it over to various charities. Andrew actually did buy tickets, $20 worth. He thinks winning the lottery would ruin his life because it would take away his drive and his purpose.  He would keep his job and just stick the money in US Treasury bonds which are one of the safest investments you can make. Even with the low-interest rate on bonds of about 2%, taking the lump sum of the recent Power Ball would still earn $1.2 million per month.  2. Do you recommend any on-line stock simulator games for those new to investing?  Motley Fool has a good one. Most games focus on the dollar value but Caps, the Motley Fool game, removes that and base wins on percentage gain instead. The community is very active too, and it’s a good place to research stocks. People do reports and even blog about their picks. Investopedia has a simulator, and you can track stocks in Google Finance where you can create folders for your picks and track them over time. 3. I have $9,000 in credit card debt and a 15 month 0% APR. Should I take out a loan through Lending Club to pay this off? If you roll a balance over to a 0% APR card, there is a fee. Even with zero interest, you have to make the payment each month, or it triggers the interest. Pay off that $9,000 as fast as possible, ideally, before the 0% runs out because no loan is going to give you 0% interest. For more on APR check out this guide. If you can’t pay it back within the 15 months, then Lending Club is a good option. 4. I have an IRA with Fidelity. What should I do to diversify my investments? The Fidelity account you have has a high expense ratio. Even a 1% fee over thirty years of investing means a loss of more than a quarter of your investments. Fees are a killer. A 1% fee doesn’t sound like much, but over time, it is. A better Life Cycle Fund would be with Vanguard because no one beats their fees. If you don’t want to do a ton of research and compare funds, Betterment is the way to go. 5. I know it’s important to pay off debt before investing but is that still true if my student loan debt will be forgiven in twenty years? The interest is high at 6%, and while you’re on the income-based repayment plan, your income will (hopefully) increase over that time. Because interest is one of life’s biggest expenses, pay it off. Build your emergency fund up to six to twelve months worth of expenses and then start killing the loans. Thanks for the questions everyone! Show Notes LMM Community: If you want personal answers to more money questions, join us in the Community.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode Jim discusses the criminal charges against five major banks for rigging the currency markets. Bitcoin now officially listed as a currency on Google Finance. Cleveland Police arrest 71 people in riots over police shooting. Vandals hit California dam resulting in the loss of 49 million gallons of water. Are chipped credit cards really stopping credit card theft? How bankruptcy trustees are using clawbacks to sue colleges for tuition paid by the recently bankrupt, and Ripple Labs receives $28 million in funding.

If you want to start buying individual stocks and make your money work for you, Google Finance is a great place to conduct thorough research and learn more about stock investment strategies that will help you reach your financial goals. This article gives you key information about Google Finance, and how you can maximize its data. Full Article Here Show Notes Betterment:  Investing made better. Google Finance:  Research at your fingertips. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of the Value Investing Bootcamp podcast, I discuss how you can purchase stocks with zero risk using virtual portfolios like the one from Google Finance

AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) is a techonology used to create Rich Internet Applications (RIA).   If you're asking "what the heck does that mean!?"  You're in the right place In this podcast episode we will talk about the uses for AJAX and how it can lead to a much nicer web browsing experience for your Java web applications. What else will you learn about in this episode? The difference between an HttpRequest and an XMLHttpRequest Why it's annoying when your website has to refresh every time you submit a form The workflow behind how websites like Google Finance or live sports scores work What JavaScript frameworks make dealing with AJAX easier Why AJAX isn't really AJAX anymore (it's more like AJAJ, but that doesn't roll off the tongue!)  

In this screencast we provide the progress of week 10 of our 3 Month Chromebook Challenge. This week we explore managing finances, online banking, and Google Finance.

STREAM PODCAST or right-click to SaveHAPPY MEMORIAL DAYToday, I present the 8th Episode of the HelpMyCashGrow.com Video Blog & Podcast with a guest speak. Speaking today, will be Joshua Hamm of Merrill Lynch about "Diversification". He gives his overview of what it is, the pros and its cons. This is, admittedly a long and overdue version as will be explained in the broadcast itself, but sit back and, hopefully, enjoy the presentation he has prepared for us. Since this is a past and overdue Episode, I still haven't had the chance to present my new microphone yet, but it will be coming within the next episode.Links Mentioned Throughout This Broadcast:MorningstarGoogle FinanceTotalMerrill.comContact Joshua HammHope you all enjoy this episode.Leave your responses to this episode by either commenting to this post, emailing me @ tony@helpmycashgrow.com, or calling the Voice Line @ 206-984-3765.